Jareth Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
by Lucillia
Summary: Recently discovered to be Grandson to Jareth King of the Goblins, young Harry who had been named Jareth at birth reclaims his heritage and goes to Hogwarts where he is forced to deal with the machinations of one Albus Dumbledore, and a general lack of acceptance by a world that's mostly prejudiced against "Half-breeds".
1. Prologue: A generation before

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Labyrinth.

Rose Evans, wife of Harold Evans (Harry to his friends) stood alone on the balcony gazing up at the night sky tuning out the sounds of her sister-in-law's costume ball behind her as she slowly sipped her fourth glass of champagne. It was a surprisingly warm night towards the end of April, and the pale moon that hung in the glittering star strewn sky bathed the gardens of the Andrews manor with a soft, ethereal, silvery light. Neither the revelry that was taking place in the ballroom behind her nor the almost otherworldly vista before her could tame the dark thoughts that ran wild through her mind.

Louise Andrews, nee Evans had married Well. Her charm, grace, beauty, and talent on the stage had brought her a great distance from the lowly station in which her life had begun. Throughout it all, Louise had never forgotten her brother Harry and had tried to include him in her new life as much as she possibly could. The solid and and rather horse-faced Harold Evans attended all of the events his sister invited him to out of a feeling of obligation toward her rather than out of a desire to be upwardly mobile on the social ladder, and had never felt comfortable in this strange new world of money and power where he was looked down upon for being a mere worker in the mill near Spinner's End rather than admired for his strength, his work ethic, and his ability to outdrink all who challenged him. His wife Rose naturally accompanied him to these events, her eyes jealously taking in the glittering alien world of wealth and privilege that surrounded her.

To the red haired and green eyed Rose who had fled her unstable and rather miserable life in New York at the first opportunity - ironically reversing a trip some of her ancestors had taken a few generations prior for much the same reason - Harold Evans had been the solid rock upon which she built a new one after the small role onstage in London had ended, leaving her stranded in a foreign country. Their daughter Petunia (who greatly resembled her father) had been born a year after the wedding. It was very soon after Petunia's birth that Rose's rock began to crumble.

Petunia was a rather sickly child who constantly needed attention, medical and otherwise. Twice, she had become so ill that it had been feared that she wouldn't make it through the night. In the two years since her birth, Harry had become unable to handle the stress of a mortgage, a sick child, and a demanding job. He had somehow gone from spending just a little more time than necessary at the pub so he wouldn't have to face what was waiting for him at home to spending his evenings at the Widow McKinnon's house to "Comfort her". In just three years, a marriage that should've lasted a lifetime was essentially over. The only reason that she and Harry hadn't yet divorced was Petunia.

With a sigh, Rose turned her gaze away from the stars that had failed to provide the comfort she sought and moved to return to the party she had previously abandoned. It was then that she realized that she wasn't alone. Standing before her - gazing intently at the sky she had just turned away from - was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. The man's wild blond hair framed an incredibly handsome face with mismatched eyes which oddly enough reminded her of the stories of the Faerie that her Irish grandmother had entertained her with before the illness and infirmities that were the result of a life of hardship claimed her. She assumed that the man was one of Louise's old friends from the theatre, because he didn't look like any of the rich snobs she had encountered earlier. The costume that the man wore was exceedingly flamboyant, which marked him as being either from the theatre or flamingly homosexual, or both. The tight breeches beneath the open fronted shirt left very little to the imagination. She noticed that he had rather real looking pointed ears and sharp teeth when, upon sensing her gaze - or rather finally noticing that she'd spent the last minute or so staring at him - he turned to her and grinned. He had clearly gone all out on his costume for the evening.

The way his eyes drifted over her, taking her in and practically undressing her, sent shivers down her spine. Smiling, she asked if he would like to dance. He accepted, and they went inside. An hour and copious amounts of alcohol later, they found a spare bedroom that wasn't occupied.

If her dear solid Harry could cheat on her and think he could get away with it, then she could do the same to him.

&!&!&

Harold Evans paced across a rather drab hospital waiting room, stopping each time he reached one of the rather uncomfortable chairs that were pushed against the puke green walls. He would soon be welcoming a child that was not his into the world. Eight months ago, his wife Rose had discovered she was pregnant. She had immediately gone to him with her discovery and tearfully confessed to what she had done. He had understandably been stunned and extremely upset.

It was on the night she confessed that something else had happened as well, something that could almost be considered a miracle. For the first time in a long while, he and his wife had really talked to each other. There hadn't been any arguments, accusations, or false pleasantries. There hadn't been any snide comments over the other's acts of infidelity. There had only been conversation. They had just talked in a way they hadn't since shortly after their wedding, telling each-other what had been in their hearts and on their minds for so long.

Harold found it in himself to forgive his wife afterward, since he himself wasn't entirely innocent in matters of adultery, and had once had a close call with Angie McKinnon in the illegitimate child department. Rose had found it within herself to forgive him as well. Slowly, over the next eight months, their nearly irreparably damaged marriage had begun to heal itself. The one sin that should've shattered their lives and doomed their nearly destroyed marriage had paradoxically made it stronger.

The nurse eventually came into the waiting room and informed him that the child had been born. It was a healthy girl that weighed just a little over three and a half kilograms. It was finally time for him to meet little Lily Rose.

&!&!&

Harold Evans turned away from Platform 9 3/4. His little Lily had gone on to even bigger and better things than he could imagine in his plain existence. His magical miracle child who had saved his marriage and kept the best thing that ever happened to him from vanishing was just that, Magical. He should have known when the worst of Petunia's illnesses had vanished shortly after Lily's birth, but instead it had taken him eleven years and a visit from a witch to see.

Over the past eleven years, he had given Lily a great deal of love and support to counter the whispers and taunts from the cruel and mean-spirited people in the neighborhood. In everything but blood, the child who was now going to a place where almost nobody knew her past and couldn't base their opinions of her on it, was his daughter.

It was as he saw his Petunia's pinched and jealous expression while she watched the train rolled out of sight that he realized that in his quest to make Lily feel loved and wanted, he hadn't given the same regard to his own child. He would have to do his best to make it up to her somehow.

&!&!&

Author's Note: 10-9-2008: I've decided to make some cosmetic changes to the first chapters of the story, improving wording, correcting typos and misspellings, things of that nature.

3-8-2011: Cosmetic changes have been made to the chapter and those following it.


	2. Chapter 1: The Birth of a Potter Goblin

Over the years, Lily Evans grew as all girls eventually do and eventually became a very beautiful woman. There was very little of the man her mother had met at that fateful masked ball in Lily's features. In fact, she looked much like a copy of her mother. Features that had merely been striking on Rose were stunning on Lily however. It was as if someone had taken away all of the flaws and imperfections in her mother's features and made her thirty years younger. Where her mother had red hair, Lily's hair was a bright, brilliant, blazing shade that looked like fire. Where her mother had brilliant green eyes, Lily's eyes were a bright and almost impossible shade, a killing curse green that stunned all who looked into them. Lily also had a figure that was to die for, which - fortunately for her - had been mostly concealed by her school robes.

James Potter - the messy haired scion of house Potter - had watched Lily grow from a surprisingly graceful eleven year-old girl into the elegant woman she had become by the time she graduated Hogwarts as he grew up alongside her in the halls of the ancient school. As soon as he was able to do so, he fulfilled a dream he had held in his heart since he first beheld her on the Hogwarts Express and made her his wife.

On their wedding day - which was shortly before their lives were plunged into the reality of the war going on around them - Lily had been an unearthly vision in white. Her beauty had put every flower in the garden of the soon to be destroyed Potter Manor to shame on that perfect spring day. James - who stood at the altar in his dark red dress robes - unable to believe his good fortune, couldn't take his eyes off her throughout the ceremony and the reception afterward. His gaze remained on her even when his best friend and best man Sirius Black had set off a bunch of fireworks two feet away from his ear to get his attention.

A little more than a year after the wedding James stood beside his wife's bed in the Maternity ward of St. Mungos as she gave birth to their firstborn child. After more than seven hours in labor, Lily gave birth to a boy, much to his delight. First go, and he already had an heir.

"Jareth." was Lily's tired reply when asked what the child's name was, not noticing the healer's startled expression, since her eyes were firmly locked on on her new baby who already had the Potter Hair. For some strange reason, she had always liked the name Jareth, and it seemed to suit her son perfectly.

"She said Harry." James said quickly, to cover his wife's mistake "I gave her some muggle painkillers earlier, though I probably shouldn't have. I think they just came into effect. The boy's name is Harry, after her father, James after me."

_Naming a child after the King of the Goblins is something that simply is not done in the wizarding world. _James thought as he covered for his wife's apparent ignorance. _There are several things Lily still doesn't understand, and this is one of them. She will get over it once the reasons are explained to her. Harry is a perfectly good name. After all, it was her father's_.

The healer seemed satisfied with James' explanation. As far as he was concerned, muggles could never get anything right, much less something as complex as medicine. Taking hours to come into effect and slurred speech were probably common side effects of muggle medications. He warned James against giving his wife any more muggle remedies for her ailments and filled out the birth certificate. James duly signed it since his wife had just fallen into an exhausted slumber. Baby Harry was already asleep in the floating bassinet beside her bed.

While the birth certificate that James Potter had signed gave his child's name as Harry, an ancient magical artifact recorded what it considered to be the child's true name, the first name given to the child upon its birth. In the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Book of Names, a quill dutifully made a new entry beneath the one for a Neville Longbottom: Jareth James Potter Born 31st of July In the Year of Our Lord 1980 around dinnertime.

&!&!&

Several months after the baby called Harry - all hell had broken loose when Lily had found out what James had done (she hadn't forgiven him after he explained his reasons either) - was brought home from St. Mungos James could no longer deny that there was something extremely odd about his son. When the boy was first born, he had convinced himself that the slight points to the child's ears were just his imagination. Lots of wizarding babies looked like they might have pointed ears for the first few months. Then, the boy's eyes eventually changed color as most babies' eyes do; while both eyes were green, they didn't quite match. One of Harry's eyes was Lily's brilliant emerald, the other was sort of a sea green that looked like a combination of Lily's emerald and his hazel. Though the boy's hair was always a mess no matter what was done to it, it was not the standard Potter mess. Instead, it was a strange spiky mess that stuck out in just about every direction. The tiny teeth that were now just starting to grow in were rather sharp as well.

After he had performed five separate paternity tests when Lily wasn't around, and he had come back as the father each time, he concluded that this was something from his wife's side of the family that had skipped a generation or two. Such things had happened in wizarding families before (though it generally wasn't talked about), so there was possibility of it happening to a muggle family as well. Based on the prominence of the nonhuman features, sometime in the recent past, about a generation or two before Lily, something that wasn't human had somehow slipped into the Evans line.

Sighing, and realizing that he had procrastinated for a rather dangerous amount of time while he had waited for the "problem" to go away, he flooed Sirius and Remus. He hoped that they would quickly find some way to hide this if they worked together since, if it wasn't hidden very soon, it could seriously damage his son's future. Half-breeds were treated far worse than Half-bloods by just about every segment of wizarding society, and anyone that looked like it had Being or Creature blood was generally considered to be a half-breed despite the number of generations separating the person from its nonhuman ancestor.


	3. Chapter 2: Misaddressed Mail

Three months after the Marauders minus Peter had found a way to disguise the youngest Potter's less than human features, James and Lily were dead and Harry was placed on the doorstep of Lily's half-sister Petunia. The child had spent almost ten years living with an aunt who hated him for having a name he had no right to amongst other things such as the fact that since he arrived she had been unable to have any more children, and an uncle who never realized that he couldn't squish the magic out of him when the day that changed his life came.

The years at the Dursley household had passed as time often does, much too quickly for the adults and almost an eternity for the children. Dudley's birthday had come and gone yet again as had the end of the school year. Other than the incident with the snake on Dudley's birthday, nothing of note had happened in several months. While relegated yet again to the cupboard for something he hadn't done - honestly, what did the talking snake's escape have to do with him? - Harry had kept himself occupied by looking into the small crystal sphere that had suddenly appeared one day when he had wanted a closer look at his recurring dream of a flying motorcycle. When anyone approached the cupboard, he would quickly put the small sphere back in the old mop bucket under his bed where he had kept it hidden for the past two years in fear that they would find him with it and it would be taken away from him. Even his punishment had finally passed as well, and he was released back into the world of the Dursley household and his excessive chores. It was now about a week after he had been let out of the cupboard, and yet another one of his birthdays - that would most likely be as completely ignored as the last nine - was fast approaching.

The rather pale boy with messy black hair and bright emerald green eyes hidden behind the thick black frames of a pair of repeatedly broken glasses was serving breakfast to his family when the mail flap opened and the mail was dropped onto the tiled floor of the entryway. After being threatened with Dudley's Smeltings stick, he was forced to yet again get the mail since both Dudley and Vernon had proven once more to be far to lazy to get up, walk a few meters, bend over, get up again, walk back a few meters, and sit down. Trudging over to where the mail was resting, he let out a long suffering sigh. Life wasn't fair. He would always be forced to get the mail even though none of it was ever for him. Grumbling about lazy relatives who should get their own damn mail, he gathered the letters off the floor and sorted through them out of idle curiosity as he made his way back to the dining room.

_Bill, bill, bill, junk mail, postcard from Aunt Marge, letter from Dudley's penpal which I'll have to reply to yet again, hang on a moment what's this? _his inner monologue was abruptly silenced by a strange looking envelope with a wax seal on the back. He turned it over. It was addressed to Mr. Jareth J. Potter, Cupboard under the stairs, #4 Privet Drive, Surrey. He blinked twice. Life was totally unfair, someone was sending mail to his cupboard and it wasn't even addressed to him. Sighing once more, he entered the dining room and set the mail down in front of Uncle Vernon.

"What the bloody hell is this?" Vernon yelled as he picked up the envelope that had been incorrectly addressed to Harry's cupboard. Petunia quickly snatched it from her husband, her eyes narrowing as she read the name on the front. Muttering something under her breath about his mother, she tore the envelope open and perused it's contents.

"Well, what is it?" Dudley chimed up.

"Nothing you need concern yourself with." Petunia snapped as she headed over to the stove, set the letter on fire, tossed it into the trash, grabbed the fire extinguisher when the trash caught fire, and put the fire out, muttering the entire time. When the fire was finally out, Petunia turned to her nephew with an odd sad look in her eyes. She reached out as if to touch him, and when he flinched away, she pulled her arm back as if it had been burned and yelled for him to start his chores.

Harry spent his day wondering what that had been all about while he did his chores, and finally decided to ignore his aunt's unusual and frankly disturbing behavior for the time being.

Over the next few days, more letters arrived for the mysterious Jareth Potter who was apparently living somewhere in his cupboard if the insane letter writer was to be believed. Petunia destroyed every last one of them, growing more creative each time. The last few had met their fates with the neighbor's dog. Vernon - puzzled and irritated at the arrival of the unwanted mail - had called up the local post office and yelled at everyone he could reach in a vain attempt at stopping the letters. He had once tried to blame Harry for the letters and punish him accordingly, but Petunia had stopped him. Finally, Sunday came and the whole family was relieved. Sunday meant no post, which meant no letters from the mysterious and rather persistent wacko.

Suddenly, as the family was relaxing in front of the t.v. while Harry served snacks something came whizzing out of the fireplace. It was a creamy white parchment envelope addressed to Jareth Potter in bright green ink. Harry - who the letter had hit - was rather surprised. He was in the process of handing it over to his aunt for destruction - hopefully she'd do the family favorite, which was to wet them down and stick them in the blender which was then set on frappe - when about a hundred more identical letters came zipping out of the fireplace and flew towards him. Protecting his face with his arms, he fled from the room, and his relatives swiftly followed behind.

As soon as they had reached the safety of the kitchen Vernon turned purple and he began to round on Harry. Before he could strike though, Petunia pulled him out of the kitchen and into the hallway where they began to talk in hushed tones. All Harry could hear was Vernon saying "Bloody morons couldn't even get his name right." Soon after the letter storm and the argument were over, they were packed, piled in the car, and headed to only God and Uncle Vernon knew where. While Harry was quite happy to be viewing the scenery that passed by, Dudley steadily grew more miserable with each passing hour, Petunia grew more tense, and Vernon behaved rather bizarrely, stopping at completely random places before deciding to move on.

_Well, at least one good thing seems to have come out of those stupid letters. _Harry mused. _It looks like I'm actually getting a trip for my birthday._


	4. Chapter 3: Bestest Birthday Ever

Harry Potter was having the best birthday ever, and it hadn't even started yet. In fact, it would be starting in five minutes and forty seconds according to Dudley's watch. It had all started when they had gotten chased out of their home by hundreds of flying letters addressed to a Jareth Potter on what would shortly become the day before yesterday. At the moment Harry was resting semi-comfortably under a surprisingly warm if rather smelly and stained blanket on the floor of a seaside cabin (well technically it was a dilapidated shack on a rock a half mile from shore) counting all of the little presents he'd received thanks to a bunch of misaddressed letters. If he ever met this Jareth fellow, he'd thank him.

So far, he'd gotten to see Dudley getting yelled at for the first time ever, a rather nice looking replica of Stonehenge in an isolated field, Dudley getting yelled at for a second time for lying about being bit by a fairy in the woods when they stopped so he could take a leak, and one of those bums Vernon was always talking about while they were at the top of an abandoned parking garage. That list didn't include his night in a motel where he got to watch a little bit of television, or that he got an entire packet of something called Sun Chips to himself after Dudley who had yelled until he got them, had taken a bite out of one, and decided that he didn't want them after all. They weren't half bad. Then there was of course the ride in the rowboat, and the fact that Petunia hadn't given him the thinnest and most ragged blanket, opting to give him the smelliest and most stained one instead. Now, there was a real storm outside with thunder and lightning and everything. By his count, he was up 9 presents, and Vernon hadn't even handed him the traditional worn socks and wire hanger yet.

At midnight precicely, during the first second of Harry's eleventh birthday, a loud boom heralded the transformation of Harry's birthday from being the best of a bad and frankly incomprehensible situation to being actually the best and most magical birthday Harry had had in ten years, not that he remembered the first one where he threw up on his godfather after opening about a million presents and eating more cake than his tiny stomach could handle. The first boom was followed by a second, a third, Dudley requesting the location of the cannon, a fourth, a loud crack, and a thud as the front door collapsed letting in the rest of the elements that hadn't already gotten in by other means, and the largest man Harry had ever seen. Vernon Dursley soon appeared via the back bedroom with the contents of the long package he had purchased earlier, namely a shotgun. Harry watched in fascination as the large man swiftly disarmed the yelling Vernon, and bent the barrel of the shotgun over until the front end was facing backwards.

"Alrigh' there Harry?" the giant asked the boy who was sitting up watching the scene with fascination while his cousin cowered behind the couch.

"Yes sir. If I may ask, who are you?" Harry asked as he gathered the blanket around him to rid himself of the chill from the wind that was blowing in from where the door was.

"I'm Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys at Hogwarts." the giant replied.

"Hogwarts?" Harry asked.

"Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." Hagrid replied wondering why the boy looked confused.

"Um, what of what what now?" Harry said at a complete loss for words. The guy in front of him was obviously one of the lunatics that Vernon had been fleeing from. He'd probably even been the one to dump all of those letters down the chimney like some sort of demented Santa.

"Didn' yeh ever wonder where yer parents learned it all?" Hagrid asked.

"All what?" Harry asked wondering if he should humor the crazy person who was fixated on him or just run and swim for it.

"I forbid you to tell him." Vernon roared as Hagrid said "Yer a Wizard Harry."

"I think you're mistaken." Harry said as politely as he could in hopes of not offending the large man who had just broken into the shack and destroyed Uncle Vernon's new shotgun.

"Anythin' strange ever happen around yeh when yeh were scared or angry?" Hagrid asked as he fiddled around at the fireplace and mysteriously got a fire started where Vernon had failed miserably.

Harry found himself thinking back. There was the time when..., and the other time that... He turned to his aunt Petunia. She had the strangest look on her face, something between sadness and revulsion.

"You knew?" Harry asked his aunt as he realized that despite how insane it seemed, the "crazy man" was telling the truth.

"How could I not know, considering what your mother was. She went off to that school, married that jerk Potter, had you, and got herself murdered by that lunatic." Petunia spat.

"Murdered? You said she died in a car crash!" Harry yelled.

"Car crash?" Hagrid roared "Lily and James die in a car crash? That's outrageous!"

"Um, excuse me sir, why are you here?" Harry quickly asked, hoping to defuse the situation before it got out of hand which it looked to do so soon if the giant named Hagrid's expression was any indication. He wasn't in the mood to witness any homicides, even though "Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Die" had been on his wish list for years. While he wouldn't mind them dropping dead today, he didn't want to see them be rended limb from limb by a psycho giant wizard.

"I came teh give yeh yer letter." Hagrid responded making an effort to calm himself because he saw that he was frightening Harry. He handed Harry an envelope that was - other than the fact that it was slightly crinkled and looked as if something had been spilled on it - identical to the ones that had been delivered over the past week.

Harry briefly glanced at the dark red wax seal bearing a lion, an eagle, a badger and a snake surrounding a letter H before flipping it over. Disappointment settled painfully in his gut. This letter like all of the others was addressed to Jareth Potter.

"I think there's been a mistake." Harry said handing the letter back to Hagrid. "This letter is for someone named Jareth."

Hagrid looked at the letter in suprise, reading the address and frowning slightly.

" 'S yers alrigh'. 'S happened before. Happened once when I was in school. The mother named the kid one thing and the father named him another. They went with the father's choice in the end, but the Book of Names recorded the name his ma had given him since it had been given teh him firs'. Caused a fair bit of confusion during the sorting." Hagrid said as he returned the letter to Harry. "Though why someone would be daft enough to name yeh after the King of the Goblins I wouldn' know. Ol' Jareth usta get rather funny about people namin' their kids after him. After the fifteenth Jareth up and vanished, they stopped doin' it."

Petunia got a strange look on her face as she listened to what Hagrid was saying, opened her mouth to speak, seemed to have changed her mind, and closed it before saying anything though.

"What is the book of names?" Harry asked. The man in front of him was obviously answering questions and it didn't look as if he could get into any more trouble for asking them.

"The Hogwarts Book of Names is a book that records all of the wizards an' witches born in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, since it's Hogwarts' territory. Letters are sent out using the list during the summer before the kid's firs' year." Hagrid replied.

Satisfied, Harry turned his attention to the letter he held. It was his. It had been addressed to him. All of the letters had been his. Magic had come to him, and it hadn't been a mistake. He carefully opened the envelope - careful not to ruin the seal - and read its contents. After he was done, he gently folded the letter and replaced it inside the envelope, which was somewhat ironic considering how he had delighted in the destruction of its counterparts.

"Where am I going to get all of the things on the list?" Harry asked after he finished reading the letter.

"I'm takin' yeh to Diagon Alley in the morning." Hagrid replied as he pulled a piece of parchment and a quill from one of his pockets, wrote a short note, and sent it off with an extremely unhappy owl that he had pulled from another pocket of his voluminous coat.

"He's not going." said Vernon, who had finally regained his courage. "I'm not paying for some crackpot old..."

Petunia grabbed her husband by the elbow and began leading him to the bedroom, interrupting his tirade before it began and unwittingly averting a disaster. Once inside the bedroom the Dursley adults began a rather loud discussion. Harry hadn't heard anything half that bad since Uncle Vernon had come home completely smashed at three in the morning one morning two years earlier. The fact he'd parked his car on the lawn had been what had sparked the loudest portion of the argument. By the time the sun was up though, Vernon's car was in the driveway where it belonged. There had been some suspicious tire marks on the lawn that stayed for months despite Harry and Vernon's best efforts to remove them however.

"Oh, I fergot, I got something fer yeh." Hagrid said loudly over the argument as he reached into one of his pockets. "I mighta sat on it on the way over."

Hagrid handed Harry a slightly flattened pink box. On the inside was a chocolate cake with HAPPY BIRTHDAY HARRY written on it in green icing. Harry was touched. Nobody had ever gotten him a cake before.

The next morning, Harry was awoken by an owl delivering a newspaper. As Harry and Hagrid prepared to head out to Diagon Alley before everyone else woke up, they were accosted by Petunia.

"They'll take everything from you." Petunia said, looking at Harry sadly.

"What?" Harry and Hagrid asked at the same time.

"They'll take everything from you. Your hope, your dreams, your name, your life, everything, and they won't give you anything in return. I had agreed with Vernon that the magic should be squished out of you any way possible, make you normal, but I see that it was not to be. Something that is made of magic can never be normal. I tried to keep you safe even after I thought they'd stolen your name from me. I hated you for having a name you have no right to, but I tried to keep you safe. They took everything from Lily, and now they'll take everything from you." Petunia said, still looking at Harry sadly, laying bare her true feelings for the boy for first time in a long time, showing her fear for the future of a child she both loved and hated. She spoke as if from experience.

Harry stared at his aunt. The world around him had gotten to insane and passed it a while ago, so why not Aunt Petunia as well? He then turned and followed Hagrid out to the boat. All through the trip to shore and the train ride to London, he found himself turning his aunt's words over in his mind as well as another disturbing thought that had shaken him. If he had originally been named Jareth, was he really Harry?


	5. Chapter 4: Jareth Meets Jareth

When they had finally arrived in London, Harry followed Hagrid to an ancient pub that was called the Leakey Cauldron which was on Charing Cross road . Once inside the aforementioned establishment, he was swarmed by the patrons less than two seconds after Hagrid had introduced him to a rather timid looking man named Quirrel. It was a pensive and rather uncomfortable Harry that was led to the area behind the pub that turned out to be the entryway to Diagon Alley.

His dark mood vanished abruptly when he got his first glimpse of Diagon Alley. Despite it's humble entryway, the place was sheer magic. He tried to see everything as he trailed behind Hagrid, but there was just too much to take in. There were little old-fashioned shops whose windows displayed goods he had never seen before in every direction he'd cared to look. A great number of people wearing a wide variety of unusual outfits that ranged from almost normal to extremely outlandish in every color and hue imaginable rushed between the shops. Witches and wizards of all shapes, colors, and sizes wandered from shop to shop and stall to stall. The air was full of the sound of voices arguing, haggling, complaining about prices, comparing purchases, and speaking of items they wished they had or would soon buy.

"Come along Harry, yeh can look at everythin' after we finish at Gringotts." Hagrid said as he led him to a massive building made of white marble. He didn't even have to ask what the creatures guarding the entryway were. Something inside him had already told him they were goblins the instant he'd laid eyes on one of them. Once they were inside the bank, Hagrid led him up to a desk where a particularly stuffy looking goblin was shuffling paperwork.

"State your business." The goblin said curtly.

"I'm here for the you-know-what in vault you-know-which." Hagrid said as he handed the goblin an envelope. "And Harry's here to take some money out of his vault."

"Does he have his key?" the goblin asked tiredly.

"Got it here somewhere." Hagrid said as he fished through his pockets eventually finding it in an inside pocket along with a couple of dog biscuits and a ball of rainbow colored twine.

The goblin peered closely at the key, he then looked down his long nose at Harry and frowned.

"You may go about your business Mr. Hagrid, but I'm afraid I have to bring _Harry_ here to one of my supervisors for a discussion." the goblin said smiling nastily before turning to a young goblin who stood behind the desk. "Griphook, bring Mr. Hagrid down to the vaults."

"Come with me Mr. Potter." The goblin said as he left his desk and started heading further into the bank.

Confused, Harry complied as the goblin - grinning nastily - led him to a door that was at the end of a rather dark hallway. Harry - having kept up with the goblin through the maze of corridors that led to said door - wondered why the goblin had been surprised to see him behind him when they reached it.

"In here." The goblin said curtly trying to hide his disappointment.

Harry entered the room, and found himself inside a stone walled office that was furnished with a chair, a desk, a large circle with a five pointed star inlayed into the floor, and a rather bookish looking goblin.

"Mr. Potter, glamours and magical disguises of any kind are prohibited in every branch of the Gringotts bank. The penalty for crossing the threshold with one in place is a fine of three hundred galleons payable immediately and the removal of said disguise. Should you be someone other than who you claim to be, the penalty is quite a bit more severe." The goblin said with a nasty grin on his face. "I'll have to ask you to stand in the center of the circle and not move for a minute Mr. Potter."

Still rather confused, Harry complied with this request as well. As far as he knew, he wasn't wearing a disguise. As soon as he entered the circle, a pain worse than any he had ever experienced tore through his body. It had felt as if the very blood in his veins had been replaced with fire. As suddenly as it began, it was over. Other than a residual ache and oddly blurred vision, he didn't seem much the worse for wear. His mood had sunk several levels though, going from confused, curious and just a little bit irked to extremely pissed. Taking his glasses off to clean them, Harry discovered much to his surprise that he could now see much better without them. Going through the pain he had gone through might have been worth it, if only for this...It appeared that he would no longer have to worry about broken glasses.

The goblin at the desk was quite surprised by this particular development. He had half expected a complete transformation of the person before him based on the extensiveness and intricacy of the glamour he had on him, instead the boy was mostly unchanged. The blood base of the glamour had been removed, and the boy still read as a scion of the Potter line. The blood that was magically removed during the reading after the glamour removal matched the blood sample that had been submitted to Gringotts for identification shortly after his birth, meaning that the child wasn't an impostor. The changes that the goblin noticed unsettled him however, there was something about the boy that was both very familiar and just slightly beyond his grasp. The boy's hair, which had merely been messy before was now a nightmare of spikes that stuck up in every direction. The pointed ears the boy now had marked the fact that the boy had a non-human ancestor in his family's recent past, most likely Sidhe or Fae. When the boy removed his glasses, he noticed that while both of his eyes were green, they didn't quite match. The grin that swiftly replaced his startled and angry expression revealed that his teeth were a bit sharper than the average human's. All in all, not at all what the goblin had expected.

Before the goblin could open his mouth to tell Harry that the fine had already been paid from his family vaults and that he was free to go, the door burst open and King Jareth himself ran in with a bunch of papers relating to the Labrynth that needed to be taken care of yesterday.

Harry turned and looked at the person who had suddenly burst into the office. His eyes had first been drawn to the really shiny black boots, then to the really tight lavender tights? breeches? that left nothing to the imaginations of some and much to the imaginations of others who wondered exactly what was stuffed down the front of his pants, then to the open fronted white shirt that exposed a vast amount of hairless chest, then to the blond hair which looked as if the man had styled it by being electrocuted after losing a fight with a pair of hedge clippers, then finally to the face with the mismatched blue eyes and awful looking makeup. Had Harry been female, he would have most likely found the man devastatingly handsome and exciting, being male, his response was entirely different.

"Who's the shemale?" Harry - who was still in a bit of a bad mood - said, unknowingly echoing the words his father had said over a decade prior, causing the Order of the Pheonix to lose any chance of goblin support during the war.

The goblin behind the desk was stunned. The boy had dared to insult the Goblin King. Men were killed over far less. He briefly wondered what the odds would be on 'Kid gets instantly transported to Labyrinth and tossed into Bog of Eternal Stench". The only thing that had saved the last person who had said that was that he had been an official emissary from the Headmaster of Hogwarts who was the acknowledged leader for the "Forces of Light", and he had been unceremoniously tossed to the pavement outside Gringotts and banned for a year for his offense. He quickly placed his bet with the security goblins while King Jareth - finally registering what the boy had said - dropped his paperwork and stormed over to the boy. The goblin watched in amusement as King Jareth picked the boy up by the collar of his scruffy and over-sized shirt, opened his mouth to yell something at the boy, looked surprised, and dropped him.

One of the goblins in accounting ended up winning the rapidly formed betting pool with "King goes easy on kid and spanks him with riding crop". Five minutes later, Harry was led out of the office and into the main lobby with a backside that throbbed painfully with every step. When he got there he found Hagrid seated in a waiting area with an extremely worried look on his face. He didn't seem to recognize Harry when he first spotted him, but when he finally did, his mood picked up rather swiftly. Eventually, Harry was finally allowed to go down to his vault which was cram packed with coins in gold, silver, and bronze as well as many unusual odds and ends. On top of it all was a letter. Harry took the letter as Hagrid filled a bag with a few handfuls of coins from the vault.

As soon as they left Gringotts, Hagrid took Harry to Florean Fortescues and bought him the largest sundae he'd ever seen. After eating as much ice cream as he could, Harry took the letter he had gotten from his vault and opened it.

_Dear Prongslet,_

_If you are reading this, it means that I am dead and that Plan A has failed spectacularly. Wormtail has most likely gotten himself completely plastered and told the secret to everyone and their mother. I hope that you weren't too badly injured, and that your mother is reading this with you. Due to certain restrictions on the inheritance of the Main Potter Family Vault that were placed by an ancestor of mine, I have emptied the entire contents of said vault into your trust vault. Please take care that you don't waste it, as the minor vaults are used as storage and don't contain very much money. I recommend that you open a new vault place anything you don't need for the rest of your schooling into it._

_If you are wondering about the changes you recently experienced, I and my dear friends Padfoot and Moony have placed a blood based glamour on you to give you an entirely human appearance in hopes of securing your future. Your mother wasn't entirely human, and we aren't quite sure what her birth father was. The wizarding world has always been cruel to those they see as half breeds no matter how high a position their families held, and now that the cat's apparently out of the bag appearancewise they won't be kind to you._

_There are always those who don't care about such things however, but they are few and far between. I would completely understand if you decide to leave the wizarding world entirely when you grow up because of this. Your mother has arranged to leave a paper trail for you in the muggle world to make it easier to do so. _

_I just want to tell you that I love you and would be proud of you no matter what you decide._

_Your Father,_

_Prongs._

_P.S. I solemnly swear I am up to no good. _

When Harry looked up at Hagrid he saw sympathy in the man's eyes.

"Is it worth it?" Harry asked.

"Is what worth it?" Hagrid responded.

"Staying." Harry replied.

"I don't know about worth it. I've never known anything else. Don' know how somethin' that is magic can live without it. Yeh've gotta take the bad with the good." Hagrid said. "Let's finish yer shopping. Yeh can make yer decision after yeh graduate."

With that, the conversation ended. Harry went shopping for school supplies, got his first ever birthday present (a snowy owl), and learned about Voldemort over dinner. After dinner, he was sent back to the Dursleys where all hell broke loose over his new appearance. Aunt Petunia oddly enough didn't seem to be entirely surprised.


	6. Chapter 5: Petunia

Petunia glanced over at her much changed nephew, who was watching a children's movie that Dudley had declared too babyish and chucked in with all of his other unwanted movies with the oddest look on his face. Instead of tossing the video out as she normally would have done when it no longer pleased her son, she had given it to Harry and allowed him to watch it just this once. It was hard to get over the ten years of hate and bitterness, part of which had been based on a lie. Since having Dudley had proven to be rather difficult, it was entirely possible that she would not have had any more children whether or not her nephew had been abandoned to her care. The name Harry had been the name she had claimed for her second son, the one she was to have after Dudley (named for his paternal grandfather) turned two.

She had wanted something of her father that Lily didn't have, and his name was the one thing she had decided was far more important and far more valuable than any of the small amount of material property that had been divided between the two of them. Lily had acknowledged this, and swore never to give the name to any of her children so it could be Petunia's and Petunia's alone. After Lily had died, Harry had arrived on their doorstep with the name that was to be reserved for her second son. Then - no matter how hard and often she tried - the son that the name belonged to never came. Over time, she became increasingly bitter and hateful towards the child that had been entrusted to her care, the child who she had come to believe had stolen the name that belonged to her baby, a baby that she had come to believe that the child had somehow prevented her from having.

The instant that she had gotten home from that dreadful hut on that godawful rock that they had to be rescued from, she had grabbed the papers she had been given when Harry had been left on her doorstep and looked at the boy's birth certificate for the first time. Lily hadn't stolen the name from her. If the date and time she saw beside the signature - which wasn't Lily's - was correct, she couldn't have. Lily had almost died giving birth to her son, and had fallen into a week-long coma almost immediately after the child was born. It had been James who had taken the name he had no right to. Just as he had stolen the happiness from her wedding day with a cruel prank, he had stolen the one thing she had begged not be taken. Wizards would steal everything from you if you let them. Now, she knew in her heart that Lily had given the boy the name she had decided on when they had been happily playing at planning their futures in that brief space between childhood and adulthood before the wizards had trapped her in their world and taken everything from her.

David Bowie had once again appeared on the screen, and Harry - Jareth she reminded herself, she and the boy had better get used to that name soon because she was going to reclaim what was hers and give the boy back what was rightfully his - was once again looking at the television screen darkly while rubbing his backside and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like "Shemale". She would ask, but she knew she would either not get an answer, or she wouldn't like the answer she got. In the two weeks since the boy had learned he was a wizard, the slightly dreamy look he would get when he was doing something that was easy enough that he could allow his mind to wander while doing it was gone, and had been replaced by a worried and introspective look. It had begun. They had stolen his dreams from him the moment he had returned to them, just as they had stolen his name from him when he was born.

After digging out the journal that had come with her sister's papers, she had read all of her sister's diary entries which went back to when Lily had started keeping a diary. Most of the cheerful happiness that Lily showed in front of her parents had been an act to keep from hurting them. She had seen how much her parents needed some magic in their lives and decided to keep them from being disappointed. While seemingly wondrous, the wizarding world she had seen in Lily's diaries was backwards, narrow minded, and unbelievably cruel. The people in the neighborhood had limited themselves to snide remarks and cutting comments about Lily's obvious illegitimacy whereas, in the wizarding world, she could get hurt or killed for her lack of magical ancestors. When their mother had decided to tell Lily about her real father and the night she had met him, the diary entries took a darker and more fearful turn. Apparently half-breeds - legally, those who were turned, as in the cases of Werewolves or were born with more than 1/32 nonhuman ancestry - such as Lily had believed herself to be were treated far worse than "Mudbloods".

Harry - who now looked like a faerie changeling from one of her mother's bedtime stories - would have a very hard life in the wizarding world. Knowing this, she strangely wanted to hold him and never let him go, but there was far too much bad blood between them thanks to the wizards and her own stupid and petty actions to make that possible. All she could do for the boy now was to do everything in her power to make sure he wasn't trapped as her sister had been. Seven years of magic school weren't accepted in the real world, but A Levels were. Persuading Vernon to register the boy as a homeschooled student and spend the money on the books he would need would be difficult, but she would do her best.

A knock at the door broke Petunia from her reverie. She answered the door, and found a rather strange looking man on the doorstep. It seemed that the wizards had already started visiting. The only thing that had kept her from slamming the door in the man's face immediately was the fact that he was unbelievably handsome, and she had found herself staring at him. Finally taking in his extremely unusual outfit, she swiftly ushered the man inside before the neighbors could see. If he thought she was going to invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea however, he was sorely mistaken. Before she could say anything, the man tilted his head as if he were listening to something.

"Dear Merlin, not THAT movie again. Muggles never seem to get any story right." The man said with a pained expression on his face.

"State your business and leave. I don't want any of you freaks in my house any longer than necessary." Petunia said with a sour expression on her face, blocking the man from going any further than the foyer.

"I've come to see my grandson." The man said. "I am rather concerned about his health and well-being."

"Get out!" Petunia yelled. If Ha-Jareth had had any relatives they would've come for him long before now, before she could've done the damage she had done out of pettiness and spite, the damage she had done out of a hatred that had been based on a lie and some false beliefs."You don't fool me for a second, I know for a fact that I and my family are Harry's only living relatives."

"Who fed you that line? If that were true, there wouldn't be any purebloods in the whole of Great Britain." The man snarled. "It would - admittedly - be an improvement."

"Fine. He's in the living-room, see him and leave." Petunia snapped as she moved aside and pointed him in the direction of the living-room. Why now? Why were the coming out of the woodwork now? Why hadn't they relieved her of her burden long ago?

The man stalked gracefully into the living-room, and she followed after, not wanting to have this man in her home unsupervised. He looked down at the small boy who lay on the carpet rubbing his backside and staring up at the television where David Bowie was dancing with a young girl. Apparently much smarter than the average wizard, the man picked the remote up off the coffee table and used it to turn the television off. Ha-Jareth groaned at the interruption of one of the extremely rare times that he had gotten to watch anything, much less what he had wanted to watch rather than what Dudley - who was currently off playing with his little friend Piers - wanted to watch, and turned to Petunia fully expecting to be assigned a great deal of chores. His eyes widened when he had caught sight of the man.

"You've seen him, now leave." Petunia snapped.

"Based on what I have seen of him, I'm going to be taking him with me. You couldn't be trusted with a pet gerbil much less a child." the man coldly snapped back at her "Pack your things boy, we're leaving."

Ha-Jareth looked between his aunt and the stranger as if torn about whom to obey. Petunia nodded slightly, indicating that he should do as the man said. Someone had come to relieve her of her burden ten years too late. The man claimed to be family, and looking between him and Ha-Jareth she could see the resemblance. Oddly enough, she could see a little bit of her sister in the man as well. If the man had meant any harm, the wards that Dumbledore had put in place wouldn't have allowed him onto the property. Hopefully, the boy would be cared for far better wherever he was going than he had been here. She couldn't repair all of the damage she and her husband had done to the boy, but she could let him go.

"I will be having a serious discussion with you later." the man said, his eyes narrowed as he watched Jareth empty his belongings from the cupboard under the stairs.

Moments later, the boy was gone and Petunia wasn't quite certain how she felt about it.


	7. Chapter 6: Jareth Finds Jareth and More

"Damn Dumbledore and his "Greater Good"!" Jareth (the elder) yelled as he threw one of the few breakable items in his throne room at the nearest wall the instant he had gotten back to his castle. Jareth had made a rather upsetting discovery when he had gone back to have his promised "discussion" with Petunia Dursley about the care she had given his grandson. Rather than tearing the family to pieces and scattering them to the four winds as he had planned, he had found himself helping them.

It seemed that Dumbledore had tied a few extra goodies into the blood protection wards that Lily Potter had set up to protect her sister and all of her blood who lived under the roof of #4 Privet Drive. Without the influence of these unwanted extras, the Dursleys would've still been spiteful, bigoted, and selfish people, but they wouldn't have been those practically soulless caricatures of human beings that he had found. His grandson wouldn't have had the happiest of childhoods with them, but he would not have gone through the hell that he had been subjected to. Thanks to Dumbledore and whatever games he was playing at, the child that Jareth had brought home was in roughly the same shape as some of the more pathetic cases that had been wished to him.

He wondered what he would say to the boy when he was asked why he hadn't come to rescue him much earlier. He couldn't very well say "I'm sorry, but I had no idea you existed until you wandered into my bank and insulted me two weeks ago.", and he knew that any lies on his part would lose him any trust the boy had in him.

He briefly wondered what he should feel about the death of his daughter. After all, he had never known the girl. He never really kept track of his "Aboveground" dalliances, and only once had he been surprised by a previously unknown relative. That relative was the namesake that he had just rescued a few hours earlier.

_What a fine surprise that had been,_ he thought sarcastically.

Two weeks earlier, he had gone into the bank with some important paperwork that he needed done and filed at that infernal ministry. He had ten hours left to tend to the latest child wished to him and needed to supervise the Labyrinth to make sure the girl running it didn't actually get herself killed in her stupidity. Because of this, he was unable to do the paperwork himself. So, he decided to delegate the task to one of the supervisors at the bank. Upon entering Goldpik's office, he was greeted with an insult he hadn't heard in over a decade. Deciding to put the fear of whatever deity the little brat who insulted him worshiped into the boy who had uttered the insult, and teach him some manners, he had picked him up by the scruffy collar of his too large shirt and prepared to give him a yelling at he would never forget. He was silenced by the sight of a pair of mismatched eyes under a rather familiar pair of eyebrows. Startled by the sudden realization that the child he was holding was of his blood, he had dropped him. He didn't let the child get away without punishment though, the boy had gotten the same punishment his own father had given him when he had been unbelievably rude. He had commandeered Goldpik's desk, tossed the boy over his knee, and spanked him with his riding crop.

Since he had not been with a member of the Potter family in the last three centuries, he determined through the process of elimination that it was the boy's mother who was one of his offspring. Due to the fact that the boy in question was Harry Potter - The Boy-Who-Lived - it had been rather easy to discover who his mother was. Knowledge of Harry Potter's place of residence was restricted in the magical world, so he swiftly ended up hitting a brick wall at the Ministry. Being aware of the fact that the boy's mother was supposedly a muggleborn, and having had dealings with the muggle world before, he set out to find the boy another way. It had taken two weeks of searching, but in the end, he found the address of Lily's half-sister Petunia.

Upon arriving at the Dursley home, he had found the small, unusually thin, and poorly dressed boy laying on his stomach on the carpet of a well appointed living-room watching that muggle film that made him out to be a tyrant and a pedophile (what the goblins said about the film when it was mentioned couldn't be translated into English, but was extremely unpleasant to say the least). When he had seen the way the boy had been dressed at the bank, he had half expected the child to have been living in a run down flat somewhere, or a hovel in some extremely poor neighborhood. The last place he had expected to find the child was a scrupulously clean and expensively furnished home in an upper middle-class neighborhood. Realizing that the boy's condition wasn't because of situations beyond his family's control, he was beyond angry.

Deciding not to frighten the boy by murdering his aunt in front of him, he had told the boy to go pack. His grandchild would not be returning to these monsters if he had anything to say about it. Upon receiving his aunt's confirmation of the order, the boy had gone to a cupboard under the stairs and started to remove clothes that were equally as ratty as the ones he wore and a few other odds and ends. And, after carefully checking to see that his aunt wasn't looking, the boy reached into a mop bucket and pulled out one item that, had the King of the Goblins previously doubted their relationship to each-other would've proven it beyond all doubt, a crystal ball with a dream inside it. As soon as the boy had packed the last of his belongings in the garbage bag that Petunia Dursley had provided, he had transported the boy to his castle and set him up in the guest quarters reserved for visiting dignitaries and whatnot.

It was when he had returned to give the Dursleys a piece of his mind and then some that he had discovered that a great deal of his ire should be turned in a different direction. The wards had repulsed him when he had tried to enter the property for a second time. When he had tried to get onto the property a third time, the wards repulsed him again. In the instant that he was repelled, he noticed flashes of color that didn't belong to the standard set of blood wards or protection wards. Carefully moving his hand over the wards to maintain a steady barrier, he noticed the little goodies that a secondary wardsetter had layered on top of the wards and rather cleverly woven into them. The blood protection ward (undoubtedly set at the birth of the Dursleys' son) had been set up by the primary wardsetter. The secondary wardsetter had set up a general protection ward, a fire protection ward, an atypical and unusually strong notice me not, and an intruder alert keyed to a secondary location, as well as a rather malevolent mess that both the general protection wards that he or she had set up and the blood protection ward the primary wardsetter had set up were struggling against. He was surprised that the wards had repulsed him at all considering the strain they were under.

Suspicious, he began to examine the other items that had been keyed to the home wards, and swore viciously when he saw exactly what they were. The secondary wardsetter had layered a negative emotion enhancer just underneath the blood protection ward - such things were often used by "Dark Lords" to enhance the fear of all who came under them - woven an infertility charm into the blood protection ward itself, tied a sort of general suspicion spell to the notice me not and keyed it to someone who currently wasn't home, added some sort of compulsion that had something to do with excess that he didn't have time to fully examine, layered on a woven bunch of other smaller negative goodies that were really going to make a mess of the inhabitants' lives in another seven years, and tossed a general protection ward over the mess before adding the standard fire protection and intruder alert. An eye less experienced than his own - which had been honed over several centuries - would've only seen a working set of wards and been satisfied thanks to one of the smaller goodies that had been woven in.

There was - as he knew from his research and the photographs he had seen scattered all over the home - another child in the house. A child that - unless wished away - could not be taken by him. Who knew what further damage would be done to the child if he continued to live under the wards as they currently were for the rest of his childhood? Fixing the mess that was in front of him would take a long time however, and time was something he generally did not have. He would not have had today if he hadn't been forced to clear his schedule. Sighing, he made himself invisible and got to work.

Five long and grueling hours later, he had finally pulled every last little goodie from the wards, set another and much stronger ward up to prevent the goodies from being replaced and/or the wards from being altered, and reappeared under his human glamour. While it would serve the Dursleys right to be re-enchanted, he wasn't about to let five hours of work be undone and further harm come to the child he had no power to remove from their home. The house before him now possessed a set of wards that would be envied by the owners of the most ancient and strongly fortified manors.

A long chat with Petunia Dursley revealed several things, amongst them was the name of the secondary wardsetter, one Albus Dumbledore who had apparently claimed to have put up the blood protection ward as well, and who seemed to have made the blood ward out to be some sort of Big Deal, when it merely hadn't been in common use for a few centuries. When he had learned of this he had been stunned, and extremely angry. When Petunia learned who had really placed the blood protection ward, she was stunned. When she learned what had been done to it and the rest of the wards around her home, she was beyond angry. He was almost tempted to turn her loose on Dumbledore just to see what would happen. In a head to head fight between the two, he had a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Dursley would win.

Due to certain treaties that had been put in place, he could not directly do anything to get his revenge on the meddlesome man who would sacrifice even children to achieve his vision of a perfect world. This left him angry and feeling somewhat helpless - a feeling he wasn't used to and didn't like feeling for very long - as he wondered exactly what to say to his damaged grandchild, and how he was going to protect the child in the future since it appeared that Dumbledore had already sunk his claws into him.


	8. Chapter 7: Questions, Questions so many

Harry sat on the bed in the room he'd been provided. He had examined everything in the room at great length while being careful not to touch anything several hours earlier, and was now both bored and tired. He briefly wondered if it was safe to get his school things and owl back form Hagrid. He had given them to Hagrid for safekeeping on the day they had gone shopping because he couldn't fit both them and himself inside his cupboard - it would've been extremely unfair to the owl if he tried - not to mention what the Dursleys would most likely do to his new belongings once they stopped being crazy and started behaving like they normally did.

The one thing he had dreamed of and longed for since he was old enough to even vaguely understand the concept had happened to him today, and it hadn't quite gone as he had expected it to. Some previously unknown relative had taken him away from the Dursleys. The relative in question however, had been the oddly dressed man he had met at the bank who had whipped him with his riding crop. Harry was unsure as to how he was going to deal with the situation, since he didn't know what to expect, nor what was expected of him. Would the man be as bad as the Dursleys, or worse? Did the man take him so he could punish him again? Was he going to do all of those awful things Uncle Vernon said men who wore makeup did to boys to him?

As each thought passed, another thought would wind its way through his troubled mind. Eventually, his thoughts became more distracting in nature, taking his mind off his fate and the possible intentions of his new "relative". He had ended up once again wondering if since his name had originally been Jareth, was he really Harry? He also wondered why his father called him Prongslet and himself Prongs. Who were Wormtail, Padfoot and Moony? was another question he found himself asking. With these thoughts, his mind turned back to the day he had learned that he was a wizard.

The letter his father had written to him and left in his vault seemed pretty accurate about the bigotry. When people had looked at him in Diagon Alley after he had left Gringotts, it was with something akin to disgust. When they caught sight of the scar though, their expressions changed to shock. It had been only after seeing the scar that the shopkeepers had become polite and helpful. Before they saw it however, they looked at him with distrust and followed him about the store as if they thought he would steal anything he could get his hands on. The only exception to this had been Ollivander who had been just plain creepy. Then, there was the boy in Madam Malkin's who had been upset over the fact that a "Half-breed" was attending Hogwarts. Madam Malkin herself had seemed surprised until she had seen the scar. Hagrid's appearing with the snowy owl and telling him it was his birthday present had picked up his mood considerably.

It was only after he had gotten home where he was greeted with shouting and insults that he had gotten a good look at himself. His black hair was even messier than it had been before - he hadn't thought that to even be possible - and stuck up in just about every direction. His eyebrows now slanted upwards, and his eyes didn't match. One of his eyes was the same color as it always was, and the other was now a completely different shade. His ears were pointed, and his teeth were much sharper than they used to be. Other than that, his face had pretty much the same shape it always had, his body was still stick thin and rather small, and his knees were still rather knobby.

The next morning, it seemed that Uncle Vernon had decided for the sake of his sanity and his blood pressure to react to Harry's appearance by mostly ignoring it rather than turning purple every time he saw the abnormality in his home. His only reaction at breakfast was to look over the newspaper at Aunt Petunia and say "The boy needs a haircut, he looks like Spock with a bad hair day." before going back to reading his paper. And, that was that. Uncle Vernon mostly ignored him, Aunt Petunia was strangely nice to him, and tried to make Vernon and Dudley call him Jareth (which brought up the question in his mind about whether or not he was Harry), and Dudley constantly teased him about his appearance. It remained that way for almost two weeks. Then his previously unknown relative came and took him away.

His musings were interrupted by the arrival of the person who had taken him from the Dursleys. His name was also Jareth and he was King of the Goblins, even though he didn't look like one. Not knowing how the man would act towards him, he decided to be polite and not bring up the "Shemale Incident". Considering what the guy was wearing, it was still rather hard not to stare. The lavender tights and white open fronted shirt ensemble had been replaced with an outfit that seemed to have been made almost entirely out of tight black leather, and the extremely high collar of his coat framed what - in his opinion - had to be one of the worst haircuts ever.

"Why do you look just like in the movie?" Harry asked, and winced because that had not been what he had been planning on asking at all. Judging by the look on the Goblin King's face it was probably the stupidest thing he had ever done. He just hoped he survived the encounter with his backside intact. Uncle Vernon hadn't been one for spankings, and he had considered that a positive aspect of his stay at the Dursleys. This man however held no such compunctions.

"Because, Jim Henson and George Lucas had gone fishing around in my wardrobe during a self guided tour of the castle while I was fishing some stupid kid out of an oubliette. I wasn't going to dump a bunch of perfectly good and extremely expensive clothes just because of a children's film, no matter how awful it was. Besides, most wizards don't pay attention to muggle things so, there really wouldn't have been a point in doing so." Jareth (the elder) spat "I've always had the hair. It's the curse of keeping it short, and I don't want to grow it out long enough to keep it from sticking out because then it would be down to my waist and too difficult to manage for other reasons. You'll understand soon enough."

"Oh." Harry said, since he couldn't think of anything else to say. He had asked what was obviously bad question and the Goblin King hadn't yelled at him for asking questions or hit him or anything. Instead, he had answered the question. He wasn't sure if he was allowed to ask any more questions though.

"Do you have any more questions?" The Goblin King asked.

Harry didn't know whether or not it was a trap. On the one hand the Goblin King had invited him to ask questions, but on the other, he had gotten upset when he was asked a question. Deciding to play it safe, he shook his head no. The Goblin King got up and began to leave the room. Two words escaped his lips unbidden shortly before the Goblin King reached the door.

"What?" the Goblin King asked, turning back to him.

"Why now?" he asked again.

"That was the question I had hoped you would never ask." the Goblin King replied, sighing as he turned back and returned to the boy's side.


	9. Chapter 8: Elsewhere In The World

As the Goblin King and his young namesake were discussing why he hadn't come earlier, several members of the Hogwarts faculty were preparing for the new year. This would be the first year that the "Boy-Who-Lived" would be attending Hogwarts.

&!&!&

In the dungeons of the castle, the youngest member of the faculty, one Severus Snape, was getting very very smashed while silently mourning his lost love. He had come to a rather painful conclusion recently, and it ate at him. He had chased her away. He had chased his beloved Lily away, and destroyed any chance with her. Her refusal to restart their friendship hadn't been because of the Mudblood comment, it had been out of fear of what he would do to her if he learned of her true heritage.

When he had seen the article in the Daily Prophet on the first of August proclaiming Lily's child to be the half-breed son of a "lying whore who had dug her claws into James Potter" he had been beyond shocked. When it had been revealed two days later that Harry Potter had indeed been the son of James Potter as proven by two members of the St. Mungo's staff who had been sworn to secrecy about the child's mixed heritage a decade earlier, the healer who had attended the birth and wasn't half as oblivious as he had pretended to be, and an employee of Gringotts, violence on muggleborns increased as people tried to prove that they were all "half-breeds in disguise who were trying to pollute the wizarding gene pool". Most of the unfortunate muggleborns who had been accosted ended up proving themselves to be the descendants of squibs which raised their status only slightly. But, there were a small minority that had turned out to fit the ever expanding definition of half-breed and hadn't even known it, or - as in very few cases, like his beloved Lily - had discovered themselves to be after their introduction to the wizarding world and hid it.

During their fifth year when - now that he looked back on it - she had undoubtedly discovered her heritage, he had ignored the fact that she had seemed extremely troubled, and with words spoken in anger he had chased her away. She had broken contact with him believing that he hadn't wanted her, that if he discovered what she was, he would hurt her like his Death Eater friends undoubtedly would have. She had gone to her grave fearing him.

It had been all his fault that she had run to that jerk Potter, and all his fault that she had died. With absolutely no muggle high school education, she had been trapped in the wizarding world. If it had been discovered that she was a half-breed, there would have been far less prospects for employment than she had had as a muggleborn. Marriage had been her only chance, and by chasing her away he had ruined his only chance with her. She had taken the first proposal she had been given, most likely fearing that she wouldn't get a second. He had been the one to chase her into the arms of the man who ended up getting her killed with his ill thought words. It had been all his fault.

He wondered what he should feel about her son. Until two weeks ago, he had been prepared to hate the boy she had given birth to because it was Potter's son. Had he not chased Lily into the arms of that bastard, the boy would have been his. The child should have been his. People would hate Lily's poor son who had done nothing wrong but be born. Would he be amongst the number of people who hated Lily's son for existing, or would he accept Lily's child and aid him as he grew? Over a decade of bitterness and habit told him to hate the boy, but the part of him that so desperately loved Lily told him that she wouldn't forgive him if he did.

His thoughts brought him full circle, back to the same point he had been moping over for the past two weeks. He had chased his beloved Lily away and into the arms of the first man who would take her. Since his lesson plans had already been finished and filed, he had more than two weeks to ponder the situation, and get completely trashed while doing so.

&!&!&

In her office, Minerva McGonagall thought of the infant that had been left on the Dursley's doorstep a decade before. Both of the child's parents had been in Gryffindor, so there was a good chance that he too would be. Having a little Sidhe in her ancestry as most Scottish witches and wizards did, she didn't really feel one way or the other about Potter's ancestry. His faerie blood was just a great deal closer than hers was. Chances were she would have to break up a great deal of fights over his mother during the next seven years.

Knowing she couldn't keep from her ever increasing duties as Deputy Headmistress, she sighed and got back to the paperwork she had to file before the start of the year.

&!&!&

The muggle studies professor, Charity Burbage, sat in her office with the list of incoming muggleborns. While most of the children would undoubtedly decide to completely immerse themselves in their new world, leaving their old one behind except during the summer - not realizing that they would become trapped in it if they maintained their course until it was far too late - there were the few who either possessed more than a minuscule amount of common sense, or at the behest of their families tried to keep up their studies in muggle courses in hopes of passing their A-levels the year after they graduated Hogwarts. Deciding to help these poor souls along in any way she could, she had - with the help of a rather well placed muggleborn who agreed with her - created Twidwilliam School for the Gifted. The purpose of this "school" was to allow the muggleborn students to take their GCSEs and ALevels before they graduated Hogwarts so they could go on to college or get jobs in the muggle world if they so chose. After all, she was the "Muggle Studies" professor and this would technically fall within her purview.

After enrolling the last of the muggleborns into the "school", she turned her mind to the news that had been at the front of the Prophet for the past two weeks. It seemed that the great "Boy-Who-Lived" who had saved the wizarding world from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was a half-breed. If there was one person who would need an escape from the wizarding world, he'd be it. Remembering there being a vague reference to the fact that Harry Potter had been raised by his muggle relatives, a plan began to form. Grabbing a quill and a spare bit of parchment to copy down the information she needed, she headed to the rarely entered room of the Book of Names. She had another Twidwilliam enrollment form to fill out.

She got a big surprise when she found the entry she was looking for. The date and time were correct, as was the surname. If she hadn't known for a fact that no entries in the Book could ever be altered once written, she would've thought it to be a joke. Instead of the boy being listed as Harry, he had been listed as Jareth. Nobody had yet noticed this fact it seemed. _The sorting this year is going to be very interesting,_ she thought as she began to copy down the information she needed from the Book of Names. She would get the rest of the enrollment information from his relatives.

&!&!&

Professor Sprout read more of the horrendous things that the Daily Prophet had written about Lily Potter. The girl she remembered teaching Herbology to was kind, helpful, and extremely brilliant, not the creature they made her out to be in the papers. That poor boy whose only crime was being born would have a very hard life ahead of him.

She would have to have a discussion with her students about tolerating people who were born different. She wasn't going to let her Hufflepuffs make his life any harder.

&!&!&

Professor Flitwick sat in his office reading the missive that had been sent to him by the Goblin King. Though not a goblin himself, Jareth the Goblin King was ruler of all goblins and goblin descended like Flitwick, having won the throne through right of conquest several centuries earlier. Despite his rather capricious nature, King Jareth was a good ruler who pretty much let the goblins govern themselves. Had the goblins not liked him, his reign would've been very short indeed.

Since the beginning of Jareth's reign, things had gotten relatively better for the goblins. He had allowed the goblins to set up a vacation spot in the middle of his labyrinth, and the babies that had been wished to him (after a proper blood adoption) had brought up the formerly declining population to viable levels. Amongst all of the major and minor improvements he'd made to the lives of goblinkind the one that was most favored was the annual tossing of the criminals, in which those who had been judged guilty of certain crimes over the year were tossed into the Bog of Eternal Stench much to the amusement of the general populace. Contrary to the bog's name, one could wash the smell off. After several months and the loss of one's friends that is.

It would seem that it was Flitwick's new duty to guard Jareth's newly discovered grandson and namesake, and guide him through the next seven years of his schooling. The aforementioned grandson was none other than the Boy-Who-Lived.

Flitwick was honored to do so.

&!&!&

Dumbledore sat in his office and pondered the coming years. He had not intended for the Potters' half-breed child to become the Chosen One of the prophecy. In fact, he had painted one hell of a target on the Potters so the light and pureblooded Neville Longbottom had a greater chance of surviving to be so. Instead, Fate had chosen the son of James Potter and his half-breed bride. In such a situation, one would of course have to make do with what one had.

It had at first seemed that his perfect world would become a distant dream when he learned on that cold night at the end of October that the wrong child had been chosen. With two day's planning, he had found a way to bring the child under his control, and his dream closer to realization. Thanks to the increasingly urgent reports from the well meaning and oft obliviated Mrs. Figg, he knew that the child would be malleable to his influence. Let that Goblin King who had stolen the child earlier that day have his two weeks, he had already had ten years to shape the boy.

When he had made his first tentative plans for the boy, the child had looked completely human thanks to James Potter's little blood based glamour. And, all of his early plans had been based on him continuing to appear so. Thanks to that well meaning but extremely stupid oaf Hagrid who had gone to the wrong teller - he had paid an elderly teller a large amount of money to ignore Harry's little glamour - and the employees of Gringotts, the boy no longer appeared entirely human. He would now have to switch to another one of the less certain contingency plans that he had come up with over the past decade. He would also have to do a great deal of damage control to protect and secure the source of new blood for the wizarding world. Using the reporters he had in his pocket, he could find a way to put a positive spin on the whole "Half-breed Harry" situation.

All of the sacrifices that were made, all of his hard work, was worth it for the Greater Good. After all what Greater Good would there be, other than the beautifully balanced world where light ruled that he saw every night in his dreams. Muggleborns and half-breeds would have their place in it of course, but it sure as hell wouldn't be at the top alongside the lightsided purebloods that would benevolently rule them.

As he sat musing, a pheonix who had seriously regretted bonding himself to Dumbledore for the rest of his (Dumbledore's) natural life was silently vowing to do everything he could to to help the boy whose life and death Dumbledore was plotting out like the chapters of a story.

&!&!&

Down in a hut on the castle grounds, Rubeus Hagrid was looking over the letter the Goblin King had sent him guaranteeing him safe passage through the Labyrinth so he could bring young Jareth's school supplies to the castle. The poor boy would be needing help and looking after while he was at the school. In fifty years, the prejudice against half-breeds hadn't changed much. Little Jareth's schooling would probably be as much of a hell as his own had been. Worse, since there would be a whole seven years of it. He may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was a great deal smarter than he pretended to be, and he knew Dumbledore had something up his sleeve when it came to little Jareth. He was going to do his best to spoil it for the old man while not appearing to do so. He hadn't almost ended up in Slytherin for nothing. He was grateful to Dumbledore for getting him his job, but that gratitude didn't extend to allowing serious harm to come to any of the children at the school no matter what their status in life.

He picked up young Jareth's trunk and the cage with his new owl, and set out to get them to him.

&!&!&

In a certain house in Surrey, Petunia Dursley quietly filled out the forms necessary to get the name back as an owl requesting information quietly winged its way towards her from Scotland. Her nephew Jareth would be getting his name back from the thieving wizards as well when these forms went through. She had been feeling alot less moody and quite a bit more relaxed over the past couple of hours, and oddly enough didn't feel like she had to do her midnight kitchen scrubdown.

&!&!&

In a castle beyond a goblin city at the center of a labyrinth, a small dark haired boy asked one final question that evening.

"Did my aunt love me?"

"Yes, in her own way, I do believe she did." was the reply.


	10. Chapter 9: The Sorting

Jareth the younger - as he was now being called by the goblins - had been quite happy to see Hagrid when he arrived with his school supplies the next morning. After little Jareth got his things put away, they spent quite a few hours talking about what to expect at Hogwarts. After the long discussion and a late lunch, Hagrid finally departed. That night, Jareth named his new snowy owl Hedwig after a name he had found and liked in the History textbook that he had begun voraciously reading shortly after dinner. When Jareth the elder came to check on him at two in the morning, he was still reading.

It was a rather tired and somewhat cranky Jareth (the younger) who received the news later that morning that King Jareth's personal tailor would be coming over that afternoon to fit him for some new clothing. Considering his mood, his reaction was entirely understandable. After hearing the news, he had screamed a long drawn out Nooooooo as if his world was ending and raced to his room where he promptly locked the door. Nothing could make him budge. The tailor - who had been raving about the possibilities of what he could do with sequins and feathers - had been forced to leave without having seen his young client. He was of course compensated for his wasted time. Furious that his grandson had turned down one of the wizarding world's most exclusive tailors, King Jareth had stormed into young Jareth's room to give him a lecture he'd never forget.

It was the look his grandson gave him before making himself scarce at the sight of his expression that had stopped him. He'd seen true terror in the boy's eyes. It was then that he remembered what the child had gone through for the past ten years. Realizing that he could've permanently damaged his relationship with the child over something that was comparatively rather trivial, he forced himself to calm down, and called for the boy to come out of the cabinet he'd hidden in rather than grabbing him and dragging him out. When the boy was finally before him, he decided to question him. He soon learned that if he had just consulted the boy, he could've saved himself a great deal of time and money. In fact, he could've gotten the boy an entire wardrobe that the child would've found suitable with the money he had just given the tailor.

Sighing, he arranged for one of the goblins to take his grandson shopping for clothes. While he wouldn't be caught dead in off-the-rack attire, it was probably the best option for a growing boy with pedestrian tastes in modern clothing.

&!&!&

Over the next two weeks, a boy who had once been called Harry and had lived in a cupboard under the stairs got used to his new name and his new station in life. While he was rather high ranking amongst the goblins, the wizards and witches he encountered seemed to think him to be far beneath them. When all things were balanced out, he found himself rather happy and far better off than he had previously been. He now had clothes that fit, more food than he could ever eat, an entire set of rooms complete with bathroom, and a grandfather who would tell him stories and teach him the kind of magic you couldn't do with a wand when he had the time to do so. The wizards and witches who sneered at him, insulted him, stared at him as if he was an exhibit in a zoo, and whispered things behind his back when they thought he couldn't hear him could go to hell for all he cared.

&!&!&

Finally, it was time for young Jareth to go to Hogwarts. On the morning of September 1st, his grandfather transported him and his luggage to Platform 9 and 3/4. It was there that he boarded the train that would take him to his new school. He seated himself comfortably in an empty compartment towards the end of the last passenger car. He was soon joined by a red haired boy who seemed to be one of the people who contented themselves with staring at him as if he was a zoo exhibit. Deciding to ignore the boy, he pulled a book out of his trunk and began to read.

"You're Harry Potter." the red haired boy said once he found his voice.

"It talks." young Jareth said not looking up from his book.

Realizing that he was being ignored, the red haired boy turned to look out the window.

The train started its journey and after several hours, a rather unhealthy lunch that mainly consisted of sweets, a fight with a boy named Malfoy and a pair of thugs named Crabbe and Goyle, the red haired boy finally revealing his name to be Ron Weasley, a girl looking for a lost toad, and a failed spell from Weasley which Jareth corrected, the train finally arrived at Hogsmeade. Once the children began to disembark, Hagrid called out for the First years to join him by the lake. The ride to the lake was an uncomfortable one with the other three occupants of the boat - none of which were Weasley - staring at him like he had an extra head or something.

Finally, after arriving at the castle and milling about in the entry hall for a while, it was time to line up for the sorting. After lining up and entering the Great Hall with its floating candles and star strewn ceiling, the children were called up one by one in alphabetical order to try on a singing hat. Young Jareth spent his time in line praying that he didn't end up in Slytherin where Crabbe, now Goyle, now Malfoy had been sorted. There was a pause. Jareth looked up. Professor McGonagall stood there with a puzzled look on her face. Finally, she spoke.

"Potter, Jareth" she called out looking over the line of children. As far as she knew there was only one Potter child, and that was Harry Potter the Boy-Who-Lived himself. Harry Potter was the one to answer the call amidst a great deal of murmuring from the students and teachers. Having seen this happen a couple times before, once when she herself was in school, she swiftly realized what had happened. Fortunately, it wasn't nearly as bad as when - thanks to an older sibling who had been in the delivery room at the time of the child's birth - one student had to go through the seven years of his schooling with the name Ugly Poo Face. Last she heard, the boy had become something called a psychologist, having left the wizarding world forever upon his graduation. Harry, no Jareth, she had to remind herself - since it would have to be the boy's name for the next seven years - walked up to the stool near the head table and put the hat on.

&!&!&

After his name was called, Jareth's heart started racing. The stool with the hat seemed to have receded into the far distance. The murmurs that had started up around him became a dull roar in his ears. In a few moments, where he would spend the next seven years and the sort of reputation he would get would be decided for him. As he approached the stool he prayed the hat wouldn't decide to send him to Slytherin. He was silently muttering "Please not Slytherin" as the hat settled over his head.

_Of course not Slytherin _a voice suddenly said, _Do you think I want to get you killed? _

Jareth jumped, startled.

_The question of course, is where to put you. You're brave, loyal to those who deserve it, and you don't have a bad mind. Ravenclaw may not be the best fit child, but it has something that will help you on your way. _The voice said.

The hat yelled "Ravenclaw", and the whole school sat silently pondering what this meant as The-Boy-Who-Lived removed the hat and walked towards his house table. They had been expecting Gryffindor like his father or Slytherin where his - to most of their minds - obviously conniving mother should've gone. Was the boy Light or Dark? Members of families from both sides went into that house.

The students and teachers were still puzzling this, and forgot to clap as Jareth took his place at his new house table.


	11. Chapter 10: Helping Ron

Young Jareth sat down in a relatively empty area of the Ravenclaw house table after he was sorted. Nobody moved to be near him, but nobody scooted away either, so it wasn't entirely a bad thing. He surveyed the other tables as the sorting neared its end. The Slytherins to a man either reminded Harry of Dudley and his friends or reminded him of himself when he was around strangers and didn't know exactly what was expected of him. The Hufflepuffs were either smiling at each other, or - as in the case of some of the newly sorted - had sullen expressions. The Gryffindors were a rather loud lot who seemed to pay court to a pair of identical red-heads who appeared to be a couple of years older than himself. The other people occupying his own table were either sitting attentively or quietly sneaking books.

The sorting ended with Jareth's companion from the train Ronald Weasley going into Slytherin with someone named Blaise Zambini. There had been quite an uproar when Weasley had been sorted into Slytherin, amidst which three older red-heads at the Gryffindor table heaped epithets and general abuse on the rather shell shocked boy who seemed to have expected to be sorted into another house. Eventually, the uproar died down and Dumbledore spouted some utter nonsense that appeared to be the cue for the house-elves to send the food up from the kitchens. As he picked at his food, he looked over at his companion from the train who appeared to be as welcome amongst the Slytherins as he was happy to be there, which was not at all. His eyes then wandered over to the staff table as he heaped mashed potatoes onto his plate, still somewhat amazed that his hand hadn't been slapped away from any of the food and that he had been able to take what he wanted.

At the staff table - which ran perpendicular to the house tables - several teachers were arrayed around the Headmaster who sat in a throne-like chair in the center. The ones that caught his attention the most were Hagrid, the bug eyed lady wearing at least half a dozen brightly colored shawls who sat a couple of places to the Headmaster's left, Professor Flitwick whom he had been previously told about by his grandfather, Professor Quirrel who was now sporting a rather large purple turban, and a professor with long greasy black hair who seemed to be doing his best to ignore the chattering professor Quirrel to his right. Suddenly, the dark haired man seemed to notice that he was looking at him. As their eyes met, his scar began to burn.

Soon enough, the meal ended and it was time to depart for the dormitories. He followed the rest of his group to Ravenclaw where he found his trunk at the foot of a rather plush four poster bed with dark blue curtains and blue down coverlet. Next to the bed were a small oak writing desk on one side, and a small nightstand on the other. He changed into his pajamas and went to sleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, all dreams he may have had had been forgotten by morning.

The next morning he got up rather early (before dawn), and decided to explore the castle. Knowing his ability to find his way back from wherever he wandered off to would keep him from getting too lost, he decided to explore the dungeons and compare them to the ones in his Grandfather's castle. The dank and dark atmosphere rather reminded him of the time he had wandered into the Oubliette when he had been exploring the Labyrinth. There weren't any critters on the walls or glittery sand though. Mildly curious about the sounds of a fight that had reached his ears, he had decided to investigate.

What he saw stunned and angered him. The two identical red-heads were beating up on the Weasley boy he had met on the train who wasn't even trying to fight back. He had never liked seeing smaller and weaker beings being attacked, be they human or animal. While Ron Weasley was larger than he was, he was smaller than the boys who were attacking him. Boys whom he was clearly related to, boys who were either his brothers or his cousins. Families weren't supposed to treat each other the way Dudley had treated him. He did the only thing he could think of at the time, he joined the fray and attacked the older boys. Surprised at being attacked, the boys backed off and left.

"I didn't need your help!" Weasley yelled as he attempted to staunch the flow of blood from his nose after the boys had left.

"I know you didn't, I just don't like seeing two on one and decided to even the odds." Jareth replied handing the handkerchief he usually used to use to clean his glasses until he didn't need them anymore to the Weasley boy.

"I didn't mean to end up in Slytherin. If I knew that wanting to be better than my brothers would land me there, I wouldn't have..." The Weasley boy said trying to hold back tears as he held the handkerchief to his bloody nose. "Even the Slytherins don't want me, they made that clear last night."

"Let's go find Professor Flitwick, he should be able to help fix you up." Jareth said attempting to pull the Weasley boy up. He wasn't entirely sure that he wanted the Weasley boy crying on him. He'd probably resent it later, and be rather nasty to him. It had happened to him once in third grade, the boy ended up joining Dudley's friends in tormenting him. Best to cut the situation off at the pass.

&!&!&

Elsewhere in the castle, Fred Weasley dabbed at the puncture wounds from the bite Jareth had given him. He'd get back at that little git if it was the last thing he ever did. He turned to his brother George who was tending to a vicious scratch along his right cheek. George, knowing exactly what he was thinking, gave him a grim smile.

"Leave me out of it." Percy said knowing his brothers were planning something. The twins had gotten what they deserved for attacking Ron. He had not gone along with the attack, not because he feared losing his status as Prefect, but because the hat had also wanted to place him in Slytherin. He had fortunately gotten a couple of words in edgewise before the hat had made its final decision. Ron obviously hadn't been so lucky. He and Ron were the odd brothers out, the ambitious ones who wanted to rise above the rest. He regretted what he had said to him during the sorting.

&!&!&

Ron looked over at the boy who had helped him, the boy who had mostly ignored him on the train, other than to offer to share some of his food with him and simply go back to his book when he had refused to take him up on the offer. He had thought the boy was a stuck up prat when this had happened. Seeing the Boy-Who-Lived completely ignore him had been the death of a dream he had held since he had first heard the stories from his mother at bedtime. For the longest time, he had dreamed that he would be friends with the Boy-Who-Lived from the moment they met, and they would be in Gryffindor together where he would rise far above his brothers' shadows. Reality had been slammed down in front of his eyes the moment he had been snubbed. There would be no dream life, and he would always just be the sixth son of Arthur and Molly Weasley.

Why had Har- Potter helped him? He didn't even know him. What did he expect in return? He could've simply ignored him and walked away like a couple of his fellow Slytherins had done when they had seen what the commotion was.

"Why?" Ron asked.

"Why what?" Jareth replied.

"Why did you help me instead of walking away?" Ron asked.

"Because I don't like seeing people picking on those who are smaller than they are, and families aren't supposed to act that way." Jareth responded.

Ron noticed a certain bitterness in his tone, as if he had been talking from experience. He briefly wondered what his companion had been through to cause it.

"Thanks." Ron said.

"You're welcome." Jareth replied with a slight smile.

Ron smiled. They hadn't become friends the moment they met, and probably weren't quite friends yet, and he definitely wasn't in Gryffindor, but it looked as if at least a small part of his childhood dream would come true.

&!&!&

Author's Note: Before you ask why I put Ron in Slytherin, I put him there because I thought he could realistically have ended up there. Without Harry in Gryffindor, the main reason for him to go to that house would be family pressure. While he loved his family, he despised being in their shadow and longed to be something greater. Ron too had a thirst to prove himself, and a certain disregard for rules which are Slytherin traits. Keep in mind that not all Slytherins are cunning.

The Weasley Twins are going to be toward Harry the way the Marauders were towards Snape in a great many ways.


	12. Chapter 11: Potions and Tea

Arriving a little late for breakfast after seeing Professor Flitwick, Jareth and Ron went to their respective tables where they were handed their schedules by fellow classmates (Ron's had been defaced). Jareth briefly noted that several classes that Ravenclaw had previously been assigned to share with Hufflepuff had been changed at the last minute so that they were now being shared with Gryffindor. He briefly wondered at this, but decided that it didn't really concern him.

Over the following week, he discovered that he despised Defense Against the Dark Arts - he couldn't stand the teacher's stutter and the headache he got every time he entered the classroom - was a natural at Transfiguration, liked Charms, absolutely loved flying, and was neutral about History of Magic and Astronomy. While he liked hearing tales of the Goblin rebellions, the Goblins told them far better than the ghost at the front of the classroom that had a voice like a vacuum cleaner both in tone and in the way it sucked all of the interest out of the class did. Astronomy was nice, but the increasing brilliance of Mars disturbed him for some strange reason. Potions, which came at the end of the week, while not as boring as he was expecting it to be fell somewhere between Astronomy and Defense Against the Dark Arts. While the subject matter was interesting, he rather disliked the teacher and had a feeling the teacher didn't like his students - Jareth in particular - all that much either.

At the beginning of the class, the greasy black haired, black eyed teacher who dressed in - you guessed it - black stalked to the front of the room and gave a speech that was clearly rehearsed before taking roll. While taking roll, he paused at Jareth's name. Rather than bow as Professor Flitwick had, Professor Snape's mouth formed a grim line and with an air of utter distaste called out his name. After roll, Snape began asking the class questions from the textbook which amongst the Gryffindors only Hermione Granger had been able to answer. After asking several questions and taking several points from the students for not studying before coming to class, Snape put a practical assignment on the board and told the class to begin.

&!&!&

Snape watched the students - stalking between the desks to make sure the children he had been forced to teach weren't fouling up too badly - noting which ones bore further supervision. For a muggle raised child, Potter wasn't doing too bad of a job. It seemed that the boy had indeed inherited at least a little of his mother's talent. The bushy haired know-it-all was doing quite well as well. What the hell was she doing in Gryffindor? Longbottom and Thomas' potion didn't even resemble anything close to what the assignment called for. In exactly what order had the children put the ingredients in? It seems that most of the mistakes are Longbottom's. He bears further watching before he blows himself or someone else up.

As Snape was on the other side of the room inspecting Goldstein and Boot's cauldron, he heard a loud hissing noise come from the direction of the Gryffindor workbenches. Apparently Neville Longbottom had forgotten to take the Thomas boy's cauldron off the fire before adding the porcupine quills. The cauldron was a molten mess and both boys were covered in boils, Longbottom more so than Thomas.

"Stupid boy!" Snape roared. "Can't you follow a simple direction?"

The Longbottom boy didn't say a word in response, he merely whined in fear and pain as several more boils formed where the potion splashed him. The Thomas boy appeared to be in a great deal of pain as well.

"Hospital wing you two." Snape said whirling around to inspect other cauldrons for impending disaster. Potter's effort was rather good, nearly perfect in fact. Coming to a decision, he stalked over to where Potter was working by himself, the odd one out amongst his peers.

"For the remainder of the time you are in this class, you will be partnered with Longbottom." Snape said. Hopefully Potter's skill would counter the disaster Longbottom apparently was, and prevent a major catastrophe from happening.

"Sir?" the boy asked, confusion written on his face.

"For the next five years, you will be Longbottom's partner in all assignments that require one." Snape said, further clarifying his statement for the boy's benefit.

"Yes sir." the boy said with a sigh.

&!&!&

After class and for most of the day, Jareth briefly wondered whether Professor Snape was trying to sabotage his grades or something by partnering him with Longbottom whose potion had been a disaster. His musings came to an end when he realized that it was nearly time to go down to have the tea that Hagrid had invited him over for. Seeing Ron on his way out, he cautiously invited the boy to come with him. Ron accepted, and they both set out for Hagrid's cabin.

When they were preparing to leave - and Ron was already out the door and heading towards the castle - Hagrid called Jareth back.

"Dumbledore wanted me teh hand yeh a bunch of clues over teh comin' year, an' it's more 'n my life's wor' not teh do so. Here's yer firs' clue, it's up to yeh if yeh wan' teh go chasin' teh mystery or not. If yeh do decide to go chasin' after teh...whatever it is, take my advice and learn teh cast a proper stunner." Hagrid said as he handed him a newspaper clipping.


	13. Chapter 12: Grandfathers and Pranks

The days and weeks began to pass swiftly for Jareth as he fell into the routine of the school year. He fared poorly in Defense Against the Dark Arts where he was constantly distracted by severe headaches, and Potions where it was all he could do to prevent Neville from blowing up his cauldron. His performance in Charms, Transfiguration, History of Magic, and Astronomy more than made up for his failures though. He spent most of his free time either exploring the castle with Ron, studying, or practicing the magic his grandfather had taught him during his free time. After learning his lesson the second time he wandered into the dungeons alone and ran afoul of Slytherins who weren't Ronald Weasley, he generally kept to the more populated areas in the castle.

In the middle of September, the Weasley twins pulled a prank on him in retaliation for defending Ron on the first day of classes. It was also on that day that his dormmates had begun getting bold enough to start picking on him as well, making it his worst day at Hogwarts so far, since he'd been rather thick skinned enough to ignore the constant remarks about him and his ancestry. He had woken up that morning to find that his trunk had been emptied, and that his belongings had been scattered about the Ravenclaw dormitories. While he was on his way down to breakfast, the Weasleys had captured him, held him upside down, and begun to remove his trousers in front of the crowd of students in the Great Hall that had also been on their way to breakfast. It had been professor Flitwick who had rescued him, though Professor Snape had been standing there watching what was going on the entire time with the strangest look on his face.

Thanks to this and several other incidents, he had ended up in a rather foul mood which didn't improve until his grandfather had visited him during the beginning of October. Jareth (the elder) arrived in the form of a rather stately and extremely familiar looking Barn Owl on the morning of October the second with a letter in his beak, much to his grandson's surprise. Jareth (the younger) sent him away with some bacon from his plate and a "Talk to you after classes." before getting up from breakfast. Knowing that his grandfather had taken time out of his rather busy schedule to visit him, even if for just a little while improved his mood greatly. After the day's classes ended, his grandfather swooped down from the sky while Jareth waited by the front entrance, and they went inside and found an empty classroom in which to converse.

Upon hearing of his grandson's troubles, Jareth (the elder) taught the boy a method for instantly retrieving his belongings from any place in which they may be hidden, and a bit of magic for preventing their further theft. He then gave in after several minutes of begging, and taught the boy several transfiguration and illusion tricks that could be done with summoned crystals. The boy caught on surprisingly quickly. Most of the children he'd taught those particular tricks to took at least twice the time his grandson did, even those who were of pure Faerie descent. All too soon, it was time for the boy to return to his dormitory and him to return to the labyrinth. After a hug and a tearful goodbye from his grandson, he turned back into a barn owl and flew off into the night, heading home.

The next morning, Jareth (the younger) got his revenge on the Weasley twins for the pantsing. Remembering the transfiguration and illusion trick that David Bowie used on Sarah in the "infernal movie", he spent the morning before breakfast practicing until he got it right. He was certain to get an interesting reaction, considering the fear of snakes that a great deal of the wizarding world seemed to have. At breakfast, he found himself unable to eat due to excitement, and had a hard time keeping the grin off his face as he waited for the twins to arrive. They eventually did, ending his nearly interminable wait. Once they were seated in their customary spot at the Gryffindor table, he calmly summoned three crystal spheres to him, and began juggling them. When he had judged that he had enough attention, and that the moment was right, he threw the spheres at the Weasley twins. While they were in midair, they appeared to turn into three rather brightly colored and venomous looking snakes. The three "snakes" landed on the twins who promptly started screaming, much to the amusement of many of the students. When the twins threw the "snakes" away from them, they turned into a trio of Ravenclaw scarves. This caused the rest of the students to laugh when they realized that neither they nor the twins had been in any danger whatsoever.

"Ten points from Ravenclaw, Potter." Professor Snape snapped as Professor McGonagall said "Thirty points to Ravenclaw for the best piece of wandless transfiguration I've seen in a long while." and Professor Flitwick said "Ten points to Ravenclaw for the exellent illusion."

After breakfast, Jareth was approached by three muggleborn students (two female and one male) who asked if he could take their younger siblings off their hands for them - as they had apparently recognized what he had done - and the furious Weasley twins who declared war. The rest of the school day that followed however had progressed normally until dinner, which led to the incident at midnight where Draco Malfoy had chickened out on a duel and he, Ron, Hermione, and Neville had discovered the three headed dog that dwelled in the Forbidden Charms Corridor.

Malfoy had challenged Neville to a duel during dinner for some inane reason that had something to do with a Remembrall that Neville had refused to hand over, and Jareth had promptly stood up to be Neville's second as he liked the boy, and nobody else seemed to be willing to do so. Ron had tagged along so he could watch the "Ponce of Slytherin" get his ass handed to him, since Jareth had spent the evening until curfew teaching Neville several moves that he thought would be useful. Hermione had trailed after them in an attempt to stop Neville who seemed to be her only friend in the entire school from getting into trouble. As it turned out, Malfoy had decided to be a no-show, and had instead informed the castle caretaker that they would be in the Trophy Room. It had been while the quartet was running from Filch that they discovered the dog.

Two days after this incident, Malfoy received a howler from his father that lectured him on proper dueling etiquette. Namely, you either show up for the duel or you forfeit. Draco Malfory had unfortunately forfeited his duel with Neville, rather stupidly creating a blot on the honor of House Malfoy. It was a good thing that Lucius Malfoy had managed to convince Neville's grandmother that Draco had been playing some childish game, or there could have been some very severe repercussions, as it was, a great deal of money ended up changing hands, going from the coffers of House Malfoy to those of House Longbottom.

Time passed some more, as it always does. Jareth attended classes, studied, occasionally played chess in an abandoned classroom with Ron and lost, gotten pranked by the Weasley twins and pranked them in return amongst other things. One morning, Harry awoke to discover that it was Halloween, the tenth anniversary of his parent's deaths. He spent most of the morning wondering about his parents, wondering what kind of people they were, what their likes and dislikes had been and other such things. His grandfather didn't know as he had personally met James Potter only once, and the man had made a bad first impression during that meeting, and he had never met his mother despite the fact that he had fathered her. He didn't pay too much attention to his classes that day, and barely noted when Hermione ran off crying after a rather rude comment from Seamus Finnegan.


	14. Chapter 13: Creatively Defeating a Troll

The day crawled forwards, and toward dinnertime the wafting smells of baking pumpkin made Jareth's mouth water and his stomach growl. He was a growing boy after all, and food trumped musings over people he hadn't really known, even if he felt he should have, and that he should be completely depressed by this day. Finally, it was time for the feast which proved to have a much better spread than the one that had taken place at the beginning of the year. Long before the deaths of the Potters, All Hallow's Eve had been a significant day to the Wizarding world as it marked the Final Harvest and the end of Summer. The Halloween feast had been a long-standing tradition at Hogwarts that was said to date back to the time of the Founders, though the celebration was said to have been a much darker one back then.

Much to Jareth's disappointment, the meal was interrupted early on when Professor Quirrel came racing into the Great Hall screaming about a troll in the dungeons. While everyone was leaving the Great Hall in a barely orderly fashion nearing mass panic after Headmaster Dumbledore had ordered the students back to their dormitories - either forgetting, or more likely not caring that the Slytherin dorms were in said dungeons - he went over to the group of Slytherins and grabbed Ron's arm.

"You wouldn't happen to know where Hermione Granger is would you? I didn't see her at the Gryffindor table." Jareth said loudly to be heard above the din. While he wasn't entirely fond of the Granger girl, he had noted earlier that her bushy head of hair had been conspicuously absent from the Gryffindor table. With a troll on the loose, that little fact became somewhat disturbing.

"I heard Pansy Parkinson telling Millicent Bulstrode that she was in one of the toilets crying her eyes out." Ron replied.

"We have to go tell her about the troll!" Jareth said as he began dragging Ron with him towards the nearest girls' bathroom. She wasn't in there, nor any other bathroom on the ground floor. She wasn't on the first floor either.

When they reached the second floor, they noticed the troll shuffling towards an open door. Once the troll went inside, they raced over and slammed the door shut with victorious looks on their faces. That was when they heard the scream and realized that the door they had shut was the one to the girls' bathroom. The girl's bathroom that Hermione had apparently taken up residence in earlier that day.

"Oh shit." Jareth said.

Ron and Jareth immediately raced back to the girls' bathroom and wrenched the door open. Inside, the troll was breaking various bathroom fixtures with its club. A flying chunk of toilet hit Ron, cutting his lip and breaking one of his teeth. Hermione was cowering under one of the sinks screaming at the top of her rather formidable lungs while this was going on. The troll began moving menacingly toward her, raising its club.

"Distract it!" Jareth yelled as he picked up a piece of a broken sink and threw it in the troll's direction, causing it to turn away from Hermione. As the troll took a step towards him, the chunk of toilet that had hit Ron hit the troll in the ear, this time having flown from Ron's fist rather than been sent flying by a club. The troll then whirled towards Ron. Jareth took the opportunity this had given him to jump onto its back, his wand going up its nose. The troll whirled about in pain, causing Jareth to fly into the nearest wall. The troll then turned to him, its club raised...

"Wingardium Leviofa!" Ron yelled, spitting out blood, his wand pointed at the troll's club. Apparently saying the first spell to come to mind, which had been the charm Professor Flitwick had taught them earlier that day.

Suddenly, the troll found itself unconscious beneath an extremely surprised buffalo. It was only confusion that prevented the buffalo from charging the humans that were in its personal space, and that confusion was rapidly fading. The buffalo was starting to look very unhappy about the situation and the environment it had just found itself in, and was starting to look like it was going to make its displeasure known to the world at large, starting with the three children nearby. It was at this point that several professors decided to join the fray.

"What the hell is going on in here?" Snape yelled as he stormed into the bathroom. After rather quickly assessing the situation, he swiftly sent a silent stunner at the now rather enraged buffalo before it could do any harm. Professors McGonagall, Flitwick, and Quirrel were standing behind him still trying to wrap their minds around the scene they were taking in. Flitwick was silently laughing for some strange reason.

"Sir, they came after me. I had read all about trolls and thought I could deal with it. They came to save me." Hermione said rather quickly, in a rather subdued tone of voice.

Jareth surreptitiously glanced out the window to see if it was raining fire and brimstone. Surely it was the apocalypse, Hermione Granger Teacher's Pet extraordinaire was lying to a teacher. The girl worshiped the ground that authority figures walked on, and she was now blatantly lying to them apparently for his and Ron's benefit, and he didn't know why. She was Neville's friend, not his, and definitely not Ron's since they were in opposing houses.

"Five points from Gryffindor Miss Granger for extreme stupidity," Professor McGonagall said. "and five points to each of your houses Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley for sheer dumb luck. The feast has been continued in each of your common rooms, I would advise you to return to yours Mr. Potter. Mr. Weasley, go to the hospital wing to get yourself checked out."

Ron and Jareth got while the going was good, somewhat reluctant to separate.

"It's a good thing that they seemed to have forgotten that we were in the girls' bathroom." Jareth muttered.

"I heard that." Professor Snape said. "Five points from Slytherin and Ravenclaw for being in the girls' lavatory."

"Nice going, you just canceled out the points we earned." Ron said, punching Jareth's arm before turning toward the hospital wing.

The next day, Hermione met Ron and Jareth in the library.

"Thanks for rescuing me from the troll." she said.

"No problem." Ron and Jareth said at the same time.

After that, Jareth, Ron and Hermione became friends. There are some experiences you can't go through without becoming so, and dropping a buffalo on top of a fully grown mountain troll was one of them.


	15. Chapter 14: Stairs and More Clues

In the weeks following Halloween, Jareth was content for the first time in a long while. He had friends, two of them for sure, and possibly one more, if Neville considered him a friend. The taunts and jeers of the other students didn't bother him as much now that he knew for a fact that there were people who cared about him, people who wouldn't leave him because of what others thought about him. If they were going to be that way, they would have done so already, before their friendships had cemented.

Seeing as, he, Ron and Hermione were each in different houses, the place they met up most often was the library. Neville - being Hermione's friend - would often join them. Ron, not being the bookish sort, would complain until they eventually left to wander the grounds or find an abandoned classroom to play games in. While he, Neville, and Hermione lacked Ron's prodigious talent at Wizard's Chess, they found themselves more evenly matched with Ron at Gobstones and Exploding Snap.

On one of the days that they would be meeting in an empty classroom rather than studying in the library - having finally convinced Hermione that recreational activities were a much needed source of stress relief that made studying later easier - Jareth found himself trapped on a moving staircase. As the staircase rotated towards a completely different part of the castle than his destination, he heard someone cast a spell. Jumping out of the way to dodge it as he did not yet know any good shielding spells, he went tumbling down the stone steps as a green spell sped by overhead. He was almost willing swear that he felt something break with every step he hit.

Eventually, he rolled to a stop at a landing in an incredible amount of pain. Before he blacked out, he could've sworn he saw Snape coming down the stairs towards him.

He awoke some time later in the hospital wing. The Headmaster Albus Dumbledore himself was sitting by his bed.

"Why are you here?" Jareth asked, surprised.

"I came to make sure you were alright, you were seriously injured yesterday." Albus Dumbledore replied.

"How did I get here?" Jareth asked remembering thinking he was finished when he saw Snape standing over him.

"Professor Snape brought you here. He managed to stabilize you on the way up, saving your life." Dumbledore said "His life debt to your father has been fulfilled, and he can now go back to hating his memory in peace."

With that, Dumbledore got up and swept out of the hospital wing with the parting words "I see your friends have left you some treats."

Jareth turned and noticed that there had indeed been some things left for him. Ron had given him one of his precious chocolate frogs that he had very few of since his family had stopped sending them, Hermione had given him a handmade card, and surprisingly enough, Neville had left him a packet of Drooble's gum. It would seem that Neville could indeed be counted amongst his friends.

Jareth very slowly munched on the chocolate frog, trying to savor it, and attempted to keep all dark thoughts at bay, especially those along the lines of if a person could fulfill a life debt by rescuing someone from harm that they themselves had caused.

&!&!&

A week later a healthy but rather pensive Jareth Potter went down to Hagrid's with his friends for tea. The tea - as always - was too strong to be drinkable owing to the different taste preferences of Giants that had carried over to Hagrid, and the cakes and biscuits were - like most of Hagrid's cuisine - nearly inedible due to Hagrid's abysmal cooking skills, but the company was incomparable. For hours, they sat and talked about nothing and everything while pretending to eat and quietly hiding rock cakes in their pockets when they thought Hagrid wasn't looking as they made excellent weapons to chuck at Malfoy and his cronies.

When it neared dinnertime, they were almost reluctant to leave. Hagrid held Jareth back when his friends walked out the door.

"I'm supposta be droppin' a hint abou Nicholas Flamel. Do what yeh wan' with it, but I don' think yeh should be stuck playin Dumbledore's game. It's dangerous it is. If yeh do end up decidin' teh follow teh clues, yeh should learn a good stunner." Hagrid said before patting Jareth on the head "Now go and catch up with yer friends."

Jareth left, wondering what game Hagrid was referring to, and whether or not it would be fun as well as dangerous considering how eccentric Dumbledore seemed to be. The fact that the old man was only playing this game with Harry, and not the whole school as well as the fact that Hagrid - who was said to have wrestled trolls for fun - thought it was dangerous and didn't want him to play worried him. Perhaps it was like one of those grown-up politics games his grandfather occasionally played with the Ministry which he didn't understand.

"What was that all about?" Ron asked.

Jareth told them.

"If it's dangerous, I think we should leave it alone." Hermione said, she may have been brave enough for Gryffindor, but she was also pragmatic.

"I think we should go for it. Dumbledore's obviously trying to train him without letting on that he's doing it, and it really can't be all that dangerous if Dumbledore arranged it." Ron said, having been raised to practically worship Albus Dumbledore, Leader of the Light.

Neville remained silent as he tried to consider all angles. While Neville was small, clumsy, forgetful, and rather timid, he had a good mind for problems. When Neville spoke up, it was usually a good idea to listen to him.

"We?" Jareth asked.

"What? Did you think we'd let you go off and do this by yourself?" Ron replied. "Hagrid said it'd be dangerous, which means you'll need help."


	16. Chapter 15: Banshees and Pernelle Flamel

The strange thing we call life is an unusual mixture of fate and free will. Some things are meant to happen, and some things happen because of the actions we and others take. Thanks to an ancient prophecy Jareth's birth as well as those of his friends and enemies had been set in stone as had some points of their lives, not all of their lives mind you, but some important points. As long as it didn't interfere with fate's design, they could do whatever the hell they wanted with the parts of their lives that weren't set by Destiny.

Snape had been destined to save Jareth from a murder attempt by Quirrel, and Jareth had been destined to suspect him for it. That had been set in stone. The time and manner of the murder attempt had not, nor had the rescue. It could have been anything, from a Jinx and a Counterjinx during a Quiddich match to Quirrel poisoning Harry's food, and Snape racing over with the antidote. It had been while Jareth had been slightly limping out of the Hospital wing during his release that Snape had limped in and started stealing medical supplies.

That had of course been three days ago.

Jareth now had other things to think about, like whether or not he wanted to play Dumbledore's game, whatever the hell it was. There really was no point in doing so, and chances were that whatever it was, it was dangerous and he could be seriously injured.

On the other hand, if he didn't play along he could end up on Dumbledore's bad side, if he wasn't already. His grandfather had told him a couple of stories about what happened to people who had irked the man who seemed to be mild mannered and eccentric when he had encountered him. His grandfather had also informed him that Dumbledore was a sneaky bastard, and that nothing had ever been tracked back to him. If his grandfather was to be believed, crossing the Headmaster could be hazardous to one's health. There was all of that, and the simple fact that he was rather curious about this "game" that the Headmaster had set up.

Coming to a decision, he wrote his grandfather, requesting any and all information he had on Nicholas Flamel.

&!&!&

The Weasley twins watched as the bushy haired Granger Know-It-All disappeared into an unused classroom with Potter, the Squib, and the Disappointment. Her friendship with Potter and the Disappointment-Who-Would-No-Longer-Be-Named marked her as fair game, despite the fact that she was in their house. It wasn't as if the Ravenclaw wannabe belonged there in the first place anyway.

"You know Gred, I don't think a person like her could be entirely human." Fred - at least for today - said.

"There's one way to find out my dear Forge. And it can be quite embarrassing in the right setting." George - they'd been using eachother's names for so long that even they didn't know which name belonged to which of them, and as far as they were concerned it didn't matter - replied.

After consulting an ancient potions tome, they made preparations. Three days later their plan was ready to be implemented. After going down to the Kitchens and making a certain request of the House-Elves shortly before breakfast, they went up to the Great Hall to see what was about to unfold. Hopefully something would happen, but there was always a chance that the potion would have no affect on its intended target. While the Granger girl didn't look entirely human with that mop of bushy hair and those godawful buck teeth, it was still quite possible that she was.

In the middle of what had previously been a rather uneventful breakfast on a rather wet Wednesday early in December, a certain Hermione Granger who had been idly eating her porridge while her nose was stuck in a book - this time one that wasn't school related, as besides being extremely studious, she was fond of Doctor Who - became a very surprised Banshee. It was the quick thinking of one Severus Snape that saved the occupants of the Great Hall from having their eardrums shattered - as that was the worst Hermione could do despite being in her current form since she wasn't a full blooded Banshee - with a well timed silencing spell.

This event was swiftly overshadowed by the actions of an irate Leprechaun that had been Seamus Finnegan who had been fully aware of his interesting heritage, and hadn't planned on advertising it. His attack on the Weasley Twins was spoken of with a great deal of awe for years afterward. When he was finished with the two of them, there wasn't an inch of their bodies that wasn't black and blue, and they had to be retrieved from a bit of ornamentation just below the ceiling by the professors.

In all of this commotion, it is understandable that nobody noticed that Neville Longbottom's ears went slightly pointed and Dean Thomas' eyes became a bit catlike.

&!&!&

King Jareth read the letter his grandson had sent him and wondered what the thrice-cursed Dumbledore was up to. An item that was purported to be the Philosopher's stone had been stored in a vault at Gringotts, but he had assumed that it had merely been someone's idea of a dark wizard trap as any idiot who made their way to the vault wouldn't make their way out again. Well, almost nobody, he reflected as he remembered the break-in on his grandson's birthday. As soon as he caught the asshole who had escaped his people's bank, he was going to make the bastard regret ever being born.

He decided to visit Nicholas and Pernelle to get an idea of what was going on, since it was their stone that was purportedly involved in this mess. As he was currently one of the few people still on speaking terms with the two indefinitely prolonged mortals, a social call would not be out of place.

The next afternoon around teatime, he found himself at the home of a grieving widow. Nicholas Flamel had been killed several months before following a break-in. Only one item had been taken from their home. There had been little doubt in Pernelle's mind about who was responsible, as Flamel had shown his stone to only one of his apprentices. Naturally, that apprentice had been Albus Dumbledore.

The silence in the large home that had been filled with the sounds of running feet and the laughter of a large number of children when he had last visited decades before swiftly became oppressive. After an hour, he had been unable to take it any longer and took his leave of the tearful Pernelle. If the Ministry hadn't declared the Flamels too old to care for children, and threatened to remove any they decided to take in from their home, he would have sent the next baby her way. She needed someone right now, and there was nobody as she had outlived all of her friends and family.

After he left Pernelle, he went to the small cemetery in which Nicholas had been buried to pay his respects. Nicholas had been rather tolerable for a Mortal, and had rather willingly taken a lot of children in in the decades when there was a surplus, since he and his wife had been unable to conceive due to a side-effect of the Elixir of Life. He had been a good father to all of the children he had adopted over the centuries, and a good grandfather to their children, and a good great-grandfather to their children's children. Jareth wouldn't have handed any children over to the couple otherwise.

As soon as he got home, Jareth wrote a letter to his grandson warning him away. Whatever was going on was definitely dangerous if not outright deadly, and he seriously doubted that the real Philosopher's stone was involved despite the fact that the real thing had indeed been taken from the Flamels. This was a trap for someone, and his namesake was either a distraction or the bait.

The letter that he didn't have time to personally deliver winged its way to Hogwarts rather swiftly in the talons of one of his pet Scops-owls, and as with all letters that he didn't personally give the boy, this one was re-directed and perused by eyes other than those of the intended recipient. Rather than being re-sealed and sent along, this one was discarded.

&%&

Author's Note: I was looking up Scops-owls on Wikipedia, and think Pigwidgeon should have been a Flammulated Owl. The one in the Wikipedia picture is so adorable.


	17. Chapter 16: Clubs and Holidays

It would be difficult to make Hermione even more of an outcast than she already was since she was a Know-It-All bookworm muggleborn who hadn't made too many friends, but Seamus "The Leprechaun" Finnigan - who was deathly afraid of Banshees - had taken to avoiding her like the plague. Harry never dropped her as a friend, as that would be rather hypocritical considering...Neither had Ron or Neville. So, despite some new taunts and a couple extra curses thrown her way, Hermione was in much the same position she had been in before.

Finding out that her mother's father's mother had been a Banshee as well as a nurse that a young soldier had fallen in love with during World War I had been interesting to say the least. In the few photographs her mother had of the woman who had been found in an alley with her neck broken shortly after her grandfather was born, she had appeared to have been a rather plain looking woman in Edwardian garb with a somewhat skeletal face and massive amounts of thick black hair that was piled atop her head in a large bun.

Seamus Finnigan's Creature heritage caused him a bit of trouble in some circles as well, but most people were afraid of pissing him off, especially after what he had done to the Weasley Twins. Other than a few extremely bigoted people whose irrational hatred overrode their common sense, most people tended to avoid the boy in the halls. The fact that Seventh Years would go out of their way to avoid a little Firstie had provided some amusement for a short while.

During the weeks leading up to the Winter Holidays, Hermione absorbed herself in some sort of project when she wasn't occupied with her studies, going so far as to cut out her "Science Fiction and Fantasy" time entirely. Jareth knew that the fact that a great deal of wizarding literature was similar enough to Hermione's beloved fantasy novels had gotten her into the habit of checking out historical tomes for "Light reading", but she hadn't been doing so lately as she had something else occupying all of her free time. As the books she had grabbed covered a wide variety of topics from cryptozoology to School Rules, Jareth couldn't make heads or tails of the project she was working on. Jareth himself was mainly occupied with attempting to find information on Nicholas Flamel when he wasn't studying, as his grandfather had proven rather unhelpful on that front.

It was a couple days before the break that Hermione finally revealed what she had been working on. Simply put, she had created a school club for those amongst the student body that were like them. She had even managed to wrangle the Flying Instructor Rolanda Hooch into the position of Faculty Supervisor somehow. Officially, Hogwarts had a new club called the Hogwarts Half-Breeds which - as of its formation - had only one member, the President and Treasurer, Hermione Granger. Five minutes after Hermione finished her long-winded explanation, the club doubled in size when Jareth bought a badge, and became the new Treasurer. Seamus shyly walked up to Jareth, and bought a club badge the next day. Since his secret was out, there wasn't really any point in denying it.

As Jareth was boarding the express to go spend the Winter Holidays with his grandfather, he heard Pansy Parkinson snidely tell Millicent Bulstrode that she should go get a badge. Smirking, he walked up to the two girls.

"Are you sure you don't want a badge Pansy?" he asked, as he held out the tin that contained the club badges.

Pansy stared at him in open-mouthed shock, whether over the fact that he had the audacity to speak to her - a pureblood - or over his insinuation, he didn't know. She then turned a rather interesting shade of red before calling him several uncomplimentary names and storming off. Millicent had a hard time hiding her laughter behind a sudden coughing fit after this, but her broad smile gave her away.

&!&!&

Albus Dumbledore scowled as he watched the Potter boy leave for the Christmas Holidays. If he had his way, the boy would be staying here in the castle, but he had no doubt that if he tried to keep the boy, there would be yet another "Goblin Rebellion". The greedy two-faced bastards didn't really need an excuse, but there was no way in hell he was going to give them one. He really didn't need to be dealing with a Goblin uprising, when there were certain loose ends still running about needing to be dealt with. When the time came however, he would happily exterminate their entire species from their "high and mighty" king, down to that mixed blood Flitwick.

One positive aspect of the fact Harry was leaving for the holidays, was that the thing possessing Quirrel wouldn't be ruining his Christmas by making an attempt on the boy's life.

The Goblin King would undoubtedly give the boy the information that had been in the letter that had been held back, but the boy already seemed to be absorbed in the mystery that had been set before him, and the test could proceed as scheduled. It was a good thing that he had taken Hagrid's sympathy for his fellow Half-Breed into account, and maneuvered the oaf's responses accordingly. Hagrid seemed to think he was doing the child a favor by trying to inform him what he was in for while "following Dumbledore's instructions". Snape's relative neutrality towards the boy didn't really factor too much into his plans one way or another, since the boy seemed to think the man actually disliked him. Had the man truly disliked him, the boy would surely have known about it.

The boy was gone for the holidays however, and there was nothing he could do about it. He may as well enjoy his Christmas the best he could.

&!&!&

Jareth got off the Hogwarts Express, and was pleasantly surprised to find his grandfather waiting for him rather than the secretary he half expected to be there. He threw all dignity aside, ran to him, and hugged him unmindful of who could be watching. Jareth (the Elder) smiled indulgently as he carefully pried his grandson's arms loose and gently chided him about proper behavior in public. Unbeknown to both of them, several students watched the scene jealously, wishing it could be that way with them and their fathers, Pureblood etiquette demanded a certain distance in public, and that distance often ended up being retained in private.

Both Jareths swiftly left the platform and made their way to King Jareth's castle in the Underground. Jareth the younger quickly caught his grandfather up on the happenings at school since he had last written, and showed him the badges for Hermione's club. Jareth the elder smiled as he listened to his grandson's prattle, happy that the boy now felt safe enough to chatter endlessly around him. When he had retrieved the child several months earlier, he could barely get the child to talk to him, much less even consider hugging him. The fact that he had opened up so quickly was a good sign. He had been afraid that he'd damaged their relationship early on with the spanking he'd given him because of his disrespect. Showing disrespect to the wrong people however, was a good way of getting oneself killed.

Children - no matter what species - were precious.

&!&!&

Ron Weasley swallowed nervously when he realized that there was nobody around to defend him from his older brothers. It was at that moment that he had wished he had taken up either Harry or Neville on their offers without consulting his mother first. Mum had had a fit over the idea of him spending the Holidays with a bunch of goblins, and rejected Neville's offer because she didn't want him to "impose" (whatever that meant). Fred and George cornered him almost immediately after the other students had left. Before they could do anything though, Percy had come to his rescue, threatening to tell Mum what they were up to.

"Why?" he asked when Percy had gotten him to safety.

"Because we're alike." Percy replied. "The hat wanted to put me in Slytherin too."


End file.
